Sumer is Icumen In

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!

Those are the first two lines of the first poem I remember reading in my first English literature class in college.

It would have been fall, then, summer behind me, with more than two thousand hours of work and study to be done before I’d see another summer, but I remember taking such delight in the lines, snatching any opportunity I could to sing them out, that I could summon the speaker’s excitement even in the dark of a windy and rainy Saturday night while driving home from my job at Waldenbooks.

They’ve never been far from me since, those lines, and I caught myself singing them again this morning, feeling such a thrill in the words I might have been the 13th century poet who wrote them down.

It’s been a long, hard season, this academic year, and, in particular, this spring semester, which has been marked by illness, deaths, dire news about the financial state of the university that employs me, and work for that university that seems to pile higher every term.

But in three weeks and change this semester will be dust–maybe dust with a few specks of glittery gold left behind, but dust just the same–and I’ll be free to go my own way for a short while, which for me means my little house, warmly populated by my cats and my dog, where I will spend the hot months doing the work that pleases me most.  Writing and writing and writing.