If I wondered just exactly what all was in my office, now I know. It was recently painted. This miracle occurred suddenly, causing me great happiness. They even did the floor. However, all had to be moved out, and then moved back in. It is now sitting all around me, not yet quite in order.
What is really sitting here is 10 years of painstaking graduate, and in some cases undergraduate, study. Every book I used in a graduate class is now sitting in this room. Each one means something to me. I remember the class, I remember the papers I wrote, I remember the pain it took to get through the class. More important, I remember things I learned, things that turned my head around, things I read that change my outlook on life. It does happen. It happened to me any number of times.
Sitting on the shelf next to me is the “Norton Anthology of Literature by Women”. The pages are so thin, they feel like tissue paper and there are 2450 of them! Enclosed in this book, only about 3 inches thick because of the tissue-like paper pages, is Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Elliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, the complete Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the complete Kate Chopin’s Awakening, Zora Neale Hurston, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks. Women whose words amazed and inspired me, and truly affected my outlook on life. This is from the very first class I took when I returned to school. That was about 15 years ago. I was 43. I returned to school in Women’s Studies, which was a very good move, if I must say so myself. I didn’t know how to word process a paper. The world of computers was knew to me. It is hard to imagine how much things have changed, since then. It is hard to imagine that I now assign and grade 10-12 page papers in upper level social theory classes. I have 4 of my own publications. Can this really be real?
Other things in my office are graduation commencement booklets, my own, my children’s, and now, 3 years’ worth of students. I miss them already, sad that some of their familiar faces will not be with me in classes this Fall.
There are a few personal things in here. Shells from a trip to the beach, where I walked with grandsons, looking for them and marveling at the waves on our feet. I miss them now, wish I could be there again. There is a little snow man hanging from a book shelf, saying, “Let it snow.” That is for the Indiana home I left behind. A butterfly with a tag that reads, “Celebrate each day,” which came from my mother. A reading-of-the-day pad, made with 3 X 5 cards, hole-punched and held together with binder rings. This came from my Dutch grandma, includes her strong Christian faith outlook, and reminds me of my past. There are two sets of book ends from Mexico– one of a man with sombrero hiding his face and taking a nap, the other set of horses. These were my father’s. Some of his books are here as well. People probably wonder why my shelves contain books on “thermodynamics” and “Who’s Who in Engineering of 1964”. My father.
And so a new Fall begins, in my freshly painted office, pieces of my identity all around me. It is a good space.
Doctor Grandma 
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