This morning I was in Ashfield; this afternoon I was in Northampton; and tonight I’m back in Brookline. Going from retreat mode to home mode requires a decompression chamber. For me, it was an audio version of Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day and the long drive.

Being at a retreat is like being a resident of the Biosphere, I decided, which is a place that Jimmy and I visited with Eli and Lydia many moons ago, so many that there was no Grace. The retreat was a sealed experience; everything that was important and riveting seemed to happen inside it. I don’t mean that it all happened inside Wellspring House — there were jaunts to more than one coffee house — I mean that it was self-sustaining and total. “Real life” was outside the sphere.

Early in the week, I started working on an essay that doesn’t have a title, but that does have a key verb: recedes. It’s about the cognitive necessity of letting go — of disappointments and joys, possessions and experiences — and the emotional desire to hold on and make it last. A few days before I left for Ashfield, I had a two-act dream. The first act was sheer experience. In the the second act, my dream self tried to get back into the first act:

This part evaporates, and I, in the dream, want it back. My dreaming self tries to imagine its way back into the scene and cannot. Dream self decides, therefore, to investigate the scene of the party, and the two meeting, and the location of the car as a way of staying close to what I just experienced. It’s still night and the party has just ended. The indoor and outdoor lights are on. I walk through the empty house, see where they stood, and walk into the back. There is a high stone wall, taller than me, and over it from the next yard other lights glow. They more than glow; they are in fact almost blinding. On this side of the stone wall, it’s hard to see. There’s darkness and shadows; only the top of the wall and the space above it is lit. I feel my way among shrubs and try to find where the car might have been parked. I start to doubt that there would be any way to find out if what I had witnessed had ever happened. I hold on to it against logic, yearning to relive what I have just lived. As I stand there, weightless in the dark, I realize that it has disappeared and it would be wise to let it go.

Dream self tells dream self this, and then I wake up, and then I lie in bed and keep thinking about the dream.

So much of what I’d been thinking about experience, how it recedes, and how we try to keep it alive or even resurrect it coalesced in the dream. I’ve written more about it than the passage above, which suddenly seems to me a fitting commentary of coming to the end of the retreat week.

You are welcome to analyze my dream in your own way. What I take from this, however, is that experiences of all kinds — art, travel, love, and other big stuff — have a powerful hold on us, when we’re in them and after we, in time, move on. And yet, although we know “the world spins only forward,” and we must keep living our lives forward, we can get caught in loops of memory, too. I tell myself, “let it go,” and yet I keep thinking about the dream.

Overheard in Shelburne Falls coffee shop on Tuesday:

I wouldn’t just be campus security, I’d be campus police.

I turned and saw a just-out-of-college-aged guy boasting to his guy and girl friends. I thought about my brief stint working for campus police as a college freshman. I chuckled. And that was it.

And then today I was working on “Dead and Gone,” the piece on my college professor, writing back into that time in college, and my campus police experience returned to me, relevantly.

When I was a freshman (at a women’s college), I worked at Campus Police. I’d show up at 10pm and sit in the station until 1am, waiting for calls into the dispatcher for the escort service we called simply “Campus Van.” Occasionally I would go out on a call and ferry a late-night studier from the library or science center back to her dorm. Mostly I would sit around the station with the night officers and one or two other financial aid students like me. There was one, a tall, wiry, stooped-over girl named Kelly, whose bleached hair showed dark roots and whose spectacles were oversized and green-rimmed, who clucked over the guys (they were all men) and flirted with them, too. One instant she’d be telling one that he looked tired and needed a nap and in the next instant she’d be slapping another playfully on the arm and pleading, “Oh, stop.” Obviously, she wanted him not to stop.

Kelly was transparent in her flirtations, and the officers were the same in their preening. Did they want to attract us, or just show off? As I sat there on the leatherette divan and stared at the television mounted to the wall near the ceiling and tried not to fall asleep, a couple of the dark-shirted officers might be punching and teasing each other while a third one would be on his back on the weight bench, raising and lowering a horizontal bar and puffing his cheeks out and in, out and in. When the bar clanked back into the bracket, I sensed that an audience was supposed to look. I glanced over. He stared at the ceiling, as if contemplating the feat he had just accomplished. Too bad you can’t save people from their efforts, because I could have told him in a sentence that I wasn’t aiming for a cop boyfriend. From the same social class, probably, as Kelly and the cops, too, I had my sights set higher: not on a monied life, but an intellectual one.

I was choosy without having a lot to pick and choose from. I had no boyfriend, having just broken up with my high school one. With my roommate, I went to a few MIT fraternity parties, didn’t get drunk, and didn’t have a good time. I wasn’t shy, but I wasn’t good at the kind of flirting that Kelly was. The only way I’d ever met boys before was in a classroom, and where I found myself, there were none.

I didn’t plan to go down this path, but my hands started typing the words, so I went.

Less writing today on a day that was still literary. Friend James and I went to the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst. The volunteer guide told me nothing I didn’t already know from reading her poems, scholarship on ED’s work, and Alfred Habegger’s excellent biography. Still, it was something to see a facsimile of the dress she wore daily (so petite) and a giant oak tree in the yard, planted as a sapling when Emily was born in 1830.

The idea that shaped the docent’s talk was that “how Emily Dickinson,” the girl who stayed at home, “ever became a poet is a mystery.” Huh? Has anyone ever heard of… imagination? James suggested that the docent’s take on the poet’s life had to do with the docent being a historian, a seeker and interpreter of clues and artifacts.

Perhaps that the docent was a historian is what prompted me to take out an abandoned, unfinished memoir piece, called “Dead and Gone,” and do some work on it. This is its (drafty) beginning, some of which I wrote today:

The photograph, candid, shows him on his bicycle. He’s smiling, and his wavy hair blows back from his high forehead. These are the days before helmets and specialized bike gear became ubiquitous. Riding up the hill to Green Hall, he’s relaxed on the seat and makes it look easy. His look is collegiate: corduroy jacket and pants, sweater, low hiking boots.

That the photo is black and white makes it look older, and paradoxically, makes him look younger. Aren’t black and white photos usually from personal archives of our younger selves, before color? I suddenly realize that, when I knew him, around the time the photo was taken, he was younger than I thought he was.

I was a college student, and he was my history professor. He seemed, at that time, in the realm of “grown-up.” I vaguely knew that he was married, had children. Perhaps he or his wife had even responded to the ad I posted in the Campus Employment Office under “Babysitter Available,” and I couldn’t help them because I was busy babysitting another family’s child.

Because he was grown-up – a man, professor, scholar – this was also a large part of his attraction for me. I was infatuated with him. I loved him as much as you can love someone you admire from ten feet away, three times a week, for the 70-minute class period.

I had not, however, thought of him or my crush for more than 10 years when I came across this picture and a long, glowing obituary of him in my alumnae magazine. This was 1999 and I had been out of school since 1987. I hadn’t seen him or taken a class with him for two years longer than that. Suddenly, though, I was overcome with shame. The obituary described his devotion to his children, scholarship, and students. The colleague who wrote the tribute, who obviously knew my former professor more deeply and steadily than I had, praised his service to the college and generosity to his students.

“I am such an asshole,” I muttered. My heart stabbed at itself contritely. I thought back to a meeting with him in his office when I, it seemed as I looked back, misjudged him. He was a nice man, and I thought he was hitting on me, and I am such a jerk. Such a jerk. An obituary might cast a life in certain light, illuminating and enlarging it. The grandeur of this one made my memory of that meeting seem overplayed, pathetically. At the time, it had all seemed so clear to me, so black and white. And it turns out I knew him not at all.

After our visit to the Emily Dickinson house, James and I found her gravestone, as well as her sister’s and parents’, in a nearby cemetery. Strange to think of her bones under there, that scruffy patch of grass.

P.S. Check out James’s more sustained description of the same field trip on his new blog, Quota.

At 11 o’clock at night, there was still one more bit of writing to do. But I was tired and didn’t feel like it: no energy, physical or creative. Not much stamina. The fan in the window was the sound of sleeping, which is what I wanted to do. I said to self, at least write a sentence. So I wrote a few, and then I kept going, not even looking at the keyboard (I can touch type). This is that piece entirely, proofread only for spelling:

At first, it is repulsive. The knowledge that the heads of one’s children are teeming with bugs is something to stomach. After their showers and before a treatment, we together sit in their messy rooms, with dirty and discarded clothing on the floor around us. It’s easy to feel poor and afflicted. We bicker.

Lice make you pay attention. Inspect. Scrutinize. And you might not like what you see: wax in children’s ears, moles and bites on their heads, hairs in their noses, teeth tartar, chapped lips, and rings of summer’s grime around their necks. And you may tell yourself This is not my beautiful house! And you may tell yourself This is not my beautiful life!

Lice disrupt your routine and get you to miss work. Children stay home from school. After you soak and smear her head for what seems like the tenth time, you plunk little girl in front of the television and let her eat her lunch there, too. You sit, exhausted in mind though not really in body (you’re upper middle class, after all), so you flop in a chair and read an issue of People that you’ve already read. Brittney and Kevin are on the cover.

Now, if their children had lice, you know they’d hire someone to handle it. A former nurse or mother of grown children who prides herself on lice detection and eradication. The business has a cute name, like Lice Busters, and promises confidentiality. It costs $400 a head to delouse it, and you know they’re glad to pay it.

Why don’t you hire a professional nit-picker? They exist. You read about one in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. Into Google you type “lice picker professional Boston,” because that’s where you live. That search avenue fails.

So you call the pediatrician, and you hope she’ll give you a prescription for something strong the kids can take to kill the lice from the inside out. The doctor’s nurse calls back, and she advises you to treat the child with an over-the-counter preparation today, and then try the same preparation again in one week. “That should work,” she chirps.

“I’ve already done that! I want the drug fix!” you want to say, but you don’t. Sighing, you hang up. You’re pretty sure that you already know more about this health topic than the doc does. You’ve lived it. And, like a terminal cancer patient, you’ve turned over every stone for information on new treatments, alternative treatments, and risky ones too. You’re ready to offer your children to medical science: “Study them.” Do anything it takes. The smell of the insecticide in the drugstore lice lotion is driving you mad. You’ve stopped liking it.

The two other children arrive home from school. They join the little one in front of the television, and you ignore all three of them. In a couple of hours, it’ll be dinner time, and then, after that, inspection time. You know how that’ll end and you’re tired in advance. Shampooing, smearing, and then pinch after pinch after pinch after pinch. They’ll go to bed late. You’ll got to bed after you clean out the sink and throw the towels in a hot water wash. Your feet will ache.

In bed, you’ll forgive yourself. You don’t have to love taking care of them every minute of every day. You just have to do it.

Interesting how I switched from first person to second person and then kept going with it. During the day I had been thinking about how a lot of my lice essay deals with the meditative aspects of nit-picking and not much about the frustration. I read, too, a long mostly uninteresting newspaper feature about the local lice scourge and one of its moments stood out for me: the mother, going into her bedroom to cry, when she learns that her daughter is infested, again. I thought, condescendingly, well, surely it’s nothing to cry about. While I never cried when our children had lice (six, seven, eight times?), it made me weary to the bone. And maybe, as this almost freewrite suggests, pissed off, too.

(Third day’s word count? Way more than day two’s, plus another essay started. Momentum is a good thing.)

For the week, I’m at Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Today was the first day of five or six days of writing and not much else. There are no planned activities, no television. In town, there’s a library, hardware store, pizza shop, and general store/cafe that makes good coffee and is open for breakfast and lunch. And that’s about it.

I’m trying to finish the draft on an essay on lice-picking, which is really (I think) about love. I might call it, “The Work Hands Do.” So far, I’ve added more than 1200 words to the document. I know that writing is not about quantity, but I do have to generate enough material to have something to work with. Here’s an excerpt:

The poison, permethrin, promises to “kill lice and their unhatched eggs with usually only one application.” The permethrin kills no lice; it slows them down for an hour or so. Immune, adapted, they cling, restively, at the bases of hair shafts and do not scurry. They’re drunk on permethrin. I have time to sight, catch, and comb them before they sober up and escape back into the jungle of hair. I dip the fine-toothed louse comb into a container of burning hot water and swirl. Captured ones float for a few moments before sinking. I don’t know, but I imagine that the sinking is a sign of death.

The lice are dark enough in the container of water that I count them. Occasionally the count seems not to add up so I hold the comb up to look for bodies trapped like seeds in teeth and find them there, suspended sideways in the comb, delicate legs scurrying in air, yet not desperately so. They seem to scurry always in a workmanlike way, regardless of footing, unable to take me in as a threat, unable to even see me, not afraid of me as a predator in the way that mice are afraid.

I make my thumb and forefinger into pliers and close over the head and tail of each trapped one and drag it down the long space between teeth it is caught in. I feel its substance, like nut meat, and I imagine eating them. I do this enough times so I think always of eating them when they are pinched in my fingers like this. It would be so easy to eat them, like completing a gesture I already know, that I feel drawn to doing in the way I feel drawn to letting my body go over the barrier at the edge of the falls or on the third or fourth level of an open air parking garage. It’s so close.

I do not eat them. It would not be something that I would do.