FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL AUGUST 16, 1999

I am back in Wisconsin.

It is a rainy morning. Baltimore was hot and sticky. It didn't make any difference that you changed clothes for supper and the evening's activities - in the five minute walk to the dining hall, your clothes were already soaked with sweat again. This is a very cool morning by comparison.

Our buildings look very sturdy by comparison to those at Goucher College in Baltimore. The dorms and dining hall and classrooms there looked impermanent, dare I say "transient," by comparison to the buildings at Ripon College, for instance. The campus looked to me like what I'd imagine a school in Key West would look like.

Always the challenge is to come back fresh to the old rituals. This walk to the pick-up in the rain, notebook protecting my eye glasses to keep them from beading up. The question this morning - the question every morning - is how to see each day with new eyes, how to be a child in an old person's world, how to live in the moment, grasp it, hold it, let go of it, then live in the next moment. We are creatures of comfort, creatures of habit, lazy creatures sometimes. How to light a fire under the mule to get him to move.

A lovely countryside this morning. It seems so long since I've seen it, since I've smelled the sourness of sweet corn leavings dumped on a field. Even in the rain, this land gets hold of my lapels, demands attention.

A mile south of Five Corners, a field of sweet corn is being harvested, even in the rain.

Not even the studied greyness of the morning sky can detract from my joy today. Like the trees, I am full and swollen, moving in the wind.