Two quick things

 * Today is the first day of classes for me. I was hoping it would be more "normal" again, but here I go with masks and seating charts and pretty much everything back like fall 2020, except class sizes are larger again.

I pray that some day before I retire I will start a fall semester as I did in the now-seemingly-halcyon days of the early 2010s.

Here is my traditional first-day-of-semester piece of music, though it feels less like there's something to be celebrated than there once was :(

 ***

Interesting dream right before I woke up (I am again trying to jerk my sleep schedule back to "go to bed around 9 pm, get up shortly before 5 am to work out): 

I was at my grandmother's house. It wasn't *exactly* my maternal grandmother's house but it was very similar in set up - the "front room" that had a front door no one used, the kitchen at the "back" of the house being the place where almost everyone gathered and that had the door people used. But the "front" yard was an extensive garden and had things she never had, like ferns and big ornamental alliums, and it had more trees.

But the real feature - my grandmother was there, and several women I recognized in the context of the dream as aunts - and the implication is they were my mother's sisters and not aunts by marriage (I remember there being three of them; my mother only had two sisters that lived long enough for me to  know them). But the other thing, that is interesting to me but did not seem at all unusual in the dream- two of them were African-American, the third, like my grandmother, was white. I don't know why that detail strikes me upon waking up, but it does. 

Anyway: my parents had gone off somewhere, my brother was elsewhere, it was me with my aunts and my grandmother. We walked around the garden area in the front yard and talked about things I don't remember, and then they went back in the house and sat in the "front room" (Almost no one ever sat there; it was the most formal room in the house and was rarely used - mostly we gathered around the kitchen table). But anyway. I realized I had to be going (I guess I was supposed to meet my parents somewhere?) and I thanked them for letting me visit, and I was trying to explain why visiting was important and what they meant to me, and one of the African-American aunts looked at me and quietly said "we remind you of who you are" and I woke up.

And I don't know. That just struck me. I do need to be reminded of who I am. I don't always KNOW any more these days; I've scuttled around like a crab for a year and a half, and even before that my head was not in a good place (too much loss) and yeah, I really do kind of ... wonder who I am any more.

Here's hoping I find myself sometime again soon.