On a more personal note:

I am happy to hear that in a week I will probably be walking again. The bones are healing nicely and the tendon too. The sprain in my right hand is healing up, slowly, but is getting better every week. I am so ready to go out in the sun and walk, walk, walk. The several-flights-of-stairs may still be a problem as I heal, but still, it’s getting better all the time, as the song goes.

With all the time not spent at physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have been reading, writing, reading, and writing. (Well, and a little movie-and-television watching: Vicky Christina Barcelona, it was great to see you!) I have been researching my childhood backyard, Oak Ridge National Labs, part of the Manhattan Project where the very first nuclear bombs were born, and the environmental damage it may or may not have caused (the DOE and EPA don’t see eye to eye on this one, and believe me, the local papers sure as hell won’t say anything negative about the city’s main employer.) So much about this place is still classified, and everyone who worked there forced to sign papers that basically forbid them from saying anything, ever, about anything, so it’s a bit frustrating – a lot of obscure scientific journals have been pored over. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of evidence but not a lot of full disclosure. Leukemia rates, thyroid cancer rates, radioactive white-tailed deer and swallows’ nests…tantalizing data but all leading up to…what?

Writing about my childhood is odd, too – I’m not, by nature, a nostalgic person, and I’ve never been much of a “confessional” poet, so my ability to reach back and conjure up stories and poems is flexing some of my unused writing muscles. In a not-at-all-metaphorical related fact, my childhood home – not only the two-story brick building but the sight of acres of roses, daffodils, lilacs and strawberries, oak trees and woods – hey, it might have been environmentally poisonous but it was still beautiful in that fertile, Southeast-river-and-mountain-valley way – has been razed to dirt. There is literally nothing left to sift through.

But I’ve managed to put together fifty-plus pages now, a new manuscript born into a world of too-many-poetry-manuscripts-and-not-enough-publishers-or-readers. Whispers of the oak trees, the odd neighbors, my childhood friends who were all the children of physicists from other countries – the Geiger counter my father always had out at all hours, his warnings about radiation exposure from snowmen – they are all ganging up on me, demanding to be heard.