(with apologies to the glassmaker whose work illustrates this post, and whose name I failed to jot down while visiting the Musée du verre in Carmaux last summer).

Like every other concept, boredom is relative to whatever else occurs, or doesn’t. At one AM this morning, I shut off my phone because the body couldn’t take any more, and attempting to give directions over the phone while the nose runs a steady drip to the floor is plain ridiculous.

The good news this morning: the person to whom I gave the directions made it to the family’s temporary home. Drove the wife to the hospital so she could see her husband. Others equipped with a vehicle will handle her immediate needs and those of her children and her step-mother. I don’t know yet how serious are the father’s injuries after the car crash.

For right now, I’ll try to rest up a bit. Work in the schools begins this afternoon. Ah, and last night before the body drifted off into blessed sleep, I found the Seamus Heaney poem I was looking for. Entitled Fosterling:

Fosterling

‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’

– John Montague

At school I loved the picture’s heavy greenness –

Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.

The mill houses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness

Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

I can’t remember not ever having known

The immanent hydraulics of a land

Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry

Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

My waiting until I was nearly fifty

To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.