Having spent way too much time trying to do math problems for two of my four classes this weekend, I spent little time noticing the ice, rain and snow outside my windows.  It was a long weekend for some people.  This semester I have a long weekend every week with no classes on Mondays.  Sometimes that means I have lots of time for other things.  This weekend all my time was absorbed into the foreign world of math, graphs, story problems and fear.  Fear that I’ll never figure this stuff out.  Fear that maybe this stuff is important and I don’t get why.

So..after spending more time chopping my car out of it’s ice shell this morning than actually driving to Ann Arbor I was in a pretty poor mood as I climbed aboard the bus. My homework wasn’t finished and worse, I didn’t even understand some of it.  But as we rounded the corner of Green Road and Nixon Road, the sun came out and a row of maple trees that in the fall are a full blaze of orange were today glowing with their iced branches catching the sun.  There were maybe 14 of them, all the same size, all similarly silvered with ice.  They looked like the fabric on the dresses of some of the Golden Globe celebrities last night.  They made me smile.  This semester will, after all, end in April, regardless of whether or not I figure out all the nuances of logs or calculus. 

When I get out of school and am working in a public library somewhere, doing what I’ve dreamed of doing, I hope what I remember from this day is the ice in the sunlight and not the fear of the math.