May 12th: Yelizaveta P. Renfro
What is today? Could it be the first day of my sabbatical? I turned in my final grades yesterday, and ahead of me still lie two hooding ceremonies, a commencement, and a colleague’s retirement party. But the teaching is over, the long slog through dark winter, and all the things along the way: reading a couple hundred essays and stories and poems, evaluating creative writing portfolios and first-year writing portfolios and senior comprehensive projects, producing the literary journal and the newsletter, participating in nine campus interviews to hire two new colleagues. Today is the first day that is mine. My Day.
And now: to guard my time, to hoard it selfishly. I’ve already said yes to two conferences in June, but I said no to evaluating book prize submissions, no to giving a reading in another state in October. The answer now must be: no no no. I will not do your things, I will do my things. The fields will lie fallow, my debtors will be released.
7:18, and I have gone to the dictionary, because I realized, upon waking, that I didn’t know, precisely, the definition of what it was I was embarking on. Study, rest, or travel. Those parts sound good, but really it will mostly be work, work, and work.
Husband is already up, sitting in the living room, drinking coffee. He tells me about the two new water aerobics instructors, replacements for the beloved Cora who retired. The Monday & Wednesday instructor knows only Zumba, which is difficult to do in a pool, and the Friday instructor has Cora’s playlist but forgets the moves. I sip my coffee, look out the picture window at the crabapple, wait for the coffee to fire up my brain.
I find Cat 2 in my study window, perched on the cat shelf Husband recently built out of the wood of a tree that fell onto and pierced the roof of our previous house during an ice storm four years ago, which he then got milled for projects (a headboard for our bed, several picture frames).
Next: Pet cat, sit down at computer, check email, check weather.
8:00, and the cat feeders dispense a rattle of dried cat food, so Cat 2 is off, racing for Breakfast 2. (Breakfast 1 was at 6:30 a.m., before I was awake.)
Next: wake the kids, first Kid 2, then Kid 1. I peek out at the backyard through Kid 1’s bedroom window, past the new wooden planter Husband has just built, at the tiny oakling, a fuzz of pink and green on its branches, nestled safely in its wire cage. I have a fraught, complicated relationship with trees, this tree in particular. I’ve published an essay about it. I’ve published essays about other trees. They matter more and more.
I make tea: boil water in an electric kettle like the one I used in Moscow twenty-six years ago, pour it over tea leaves into a glass teapot given to us as a housewarming gift twenty-one years ago. History infuses every object. If I am to tell you the story of my day, I should tell you the story of every object that fills my day. But there isn’t time.
While the tea brews for four minutes, I go into my study to glance at the headlines: “U.S. and China agree to slash tariffs for 90 days in major trade breakthrough” is at the very top, which is exactly the news I want to see today, because Kid 1 is planning to go to China in July.
8:12, and it’s time for the second round of waking the kids. Cat 1 has come into Kid 2’s room—part of the morning ritual—to wake him up, which means walking all over him and purring, but then she settles down in a patch of sun in the crook of his arm and goes to sleep. They could sleep away the morning together. Time for school, I tell Kid 2. Time to drive your brother to school, I tell Kid 1.
8:24, and Husband is making toast. Kid 1 emerges and Cat 2 begins her long morning soliloquy, meowing the story of her nighttime travails or her future hopes—who’s to say which? Perhaps she is saying she was starving in the night and starves still, her food dispenser empty. Perhaps she is saying she dreams of eating today, right now, always.
While Kid 2 is in the bathroom brushing his teeth, I remember that I had planned to find the nature area guide the college botanist sent me three years ago, so I search my email as a cat starts coughing in another room. (Mental note: look for cat vomit later.) I find the guide, first written in 1970, updated in 2016, and send it to Kid 2 in an email with the subject line: pawpaws.
8:33, and the kids are talking in the kitchen. Look at that cow lick—you’ve got the motion of the ocean up there. Kid 1 ribs Kid 2. Then Kid 1 asks me for the insurance card, because they’re going to the doctor. Why are you going to the doctor? Kid 2 wants to know. So they can tell me to eat more salmon and fewer French fries, replies Kid 1, then turns to me and asks: What’s the temperature? I say: Currently 54, going up to 83. OK, they say. You’re not even impressed that I know that? I ask. Of course you would know that, they reply. It’s my day, I announce. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Indeed. It’s all shorthand, literary allusions abounding. Kid 1 is, among other things, an English major. I want to add that it’s only mini-Dalloway Day, the training wheels version, but the kids are already late.
8:37, and the kids leave seven minutes behind schedule. Husband is waiting in his car for the kids to pull out, so he can get his car out of the driveway. Everyone leaves, and it’s just me and the cats.
8:40, and I get in the shower. 8:59, and I’m out of the shower, microwaving oatmeal. I sit down to work and open the seven-page marketing questionnaire my publisher has sent me. I have written a book that’s coming out next year, which sounds like an accomplishment, but it feels like I’ve accomplished nothing yet, since I still need to produce a 200-word description of my book, a distillation of my book into three key ideas, themes, arguments, or subjects, a two-sentence description of my book, a list of all the keywords associated with my book, and these are only questions 15, 16, 17, and 18, and I am only on page 2. I start on keywords.
Trees. Nature. Wilderness. Environment. Bears. Moose. Wolves. Red-winged blackbirds. Arctic ground squirrels. National Parks. Virginia Woolf. Walt Whitman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Darkness. Dreaming. Sleeping. Capitalism. Mental illness. Authenticity. Electrification. Light pollution. Nature deficit disorder. Environmental generational amnesia. Shifting baseline syndrome. My mother-in-law. My aunts. My mother. Life. Death. Are those keywords? Am I doing this right?
I open the folder Kid 1 sent me containing the photos they took yesterday from one of our retro Mother’s Day activities: playing with Play-Doh. Scrolling through the photos is preferable to thinking up keywords.
Trying to wash the henna off my hand (another Mother’s Day activity) is preferable to thinking up keywords (even though I don’t succeed). Opening the window for the cats so they can sniff the air is preferable to thinking up keywords.
9:30, and the cat feeder goes off again. Cat 2 sprints across the house for Breakfast 3. Cat 2 is the reason we got the feeders in the first place—the free-range feeding had made her too round, according to the vet. Now, she lives her life attuned to the sound of the tablespoon of food that rattles out of the dispenser at regular intervals throughout the day. She has become a little less round and believes she is starving. Cat 1, meanwhile, is indifferent to dry food, her dispenser burgeoning with uneaten crunchies.
I read an email from my mother, who has replied to an email I sent her yesterday, on Mother’s Day. This is very interesting considering that each member of the team would pursue different subjects, she writes, responding to a screencast the kids and I had made her, presenting our recent work: first, my history of our college’s literary journal going back to 1892, then, Kid 1’s Digital and Public Humanities work helping a local Jewish historical society compile data on Jewish businesses in a spreadsheet, and finally, Kid 2’s paper for Calculus III on using integrals to prevent whale-boat collisions. It was forty minutes of incongruous material, but my mother thinks of us as a team with eccentric interests, part of a unified panel. Perhaps: The Literary Journals of Jewish Whales.
My mother’s email reminds me that I need to finish packing her box—the one I hadn’t sent on time because I had been mired in two campus job interviews during finals week. When I asked Kid 2 to draw her a card, he’d created an image of what appears to be a turtle and a pickle falling in love. The cats are back in my study window, watching the preschoolers on the playground at the church next door, as I tape up the box.
9:59, and I water the bedroom plants—three amaryllises, an umbrella plant, a couple of succulents, and a small dried-out tussock I don’t recognize—and reflect on the fact that to properly tell you about watering the plants, I need to say we got the umbrella plant from the Potawatomi Conservatories two years ago on a bitterly cold January day known as the Day Between the Birthdays—the day after mine, the day before Kid 2’s—and how the succulents live in a pot Husband made in a clay class with the kids five years ago, and how the elder statesmen amaryllis is as old as Kid 2—seventeen—and was given to me by my mother as a gift right after he was born, and how the other two smaller amaryllises are the offspring of an amaryllis that belongs to Kid 1 that I gave them ten years ago for their performance as the wolf in Into the Woods Jr., how I had handed them a small burlap sack with a bulb and some dirt in it instead of a splendid bouquet like the other kids got, because I couldn’t bear to give cut flowers when I could give living ones, and I don’t know if Kid 1 was disappointed or if they understood that’s just the sort of mother they had, but the amaryllises are still with us today (the parent amaryllis living in Kid 1’s room with a host of other plants) while the stunning bouquets of that night are long gone, forgotten. And the final dried-out, possibly dying plant is a mystery—someone has slipped it in among the other plants, like a cowbird laying its eggs in the nest of another bird, counting on maternal care from an unsuspecting mother. (Mental note: solve the Mystery of the Cowbird Plant.)
The cats have followed me into the bedroom and are now watching the birds at the birdfeeder—mostly house sparrows and common grackles today. An occasional cardinal. I am hoping for another glimpse of the white-crowned sparrow we saw last week, but he seems to be gone.
10:11, and the rumble of trash can wheels in the driveway signals that Kid 1 is back from the doctor and the trash has been collected. When they come inside, I say: I’m going to spend the whole day taking notes, not doing the things I would have been doing had I not been observing my day. Isn’t there a physics thing where observing something changes it? What am I thinking of? Kid 1, who is also a Physics and Applied Math major, says: The observer effect? Schrodinger’s cat? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? I nod. One of those. All of those.
I relate the Mystery of the Cowbird Plant to Kid 1, who instantly solves it: they’d gotten the plant to put in a macrame plant hanger they’d made for their dad, but he’d now moved the hanger elsewhere and abandoned the plant here, among the others. Kid 1 collects the dying plant and carries it outside, to be cared for—revived?—among the vegetables. I survey the remaining plants, whose history I know, and the lachrymose papier-mache head of Yul Brynner hanging above them, peering longingly out the window, and I think of how this strange object, too, carries history, how two years ago Kid 1 made a lemon-shaped pinata and filled it with lemon-flavored treats for their dad for his birthday, and then he and Kid 2 had repurposed the pinata, giving it a face, turning it into Yul Brynner—the actor Kid 1 was briefly, in their middle school years, obsessed with—and now the bulbous pinata head, the jokey tribute to an adolescent fascination, hangs here over the plants. Everything connects me to the past, perhaps because my past is now—most likely—longer than my future.
10:24, and Kid 1 is working on their Chinese visa application on the couch, while I work on my sabbatical to-do list in my favorite blue chair (that once belonged to the college botanist). My list has twenty-two items, not counting the new writing project that I actually claimed I would be working on in my sabbatical proposal.
11:00, and the cat feeder dispenses, waking sleeping Cat 2, who saunters over to eat. 11:05, and Husband returns from water aerobics, bringing me the three books I had on hold at the library. He reports his lengthy phone conversation with his younger brother, who is preparing to get his first colonoscopy.
Kid 1 announces they need to go to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago tomorrow, to submit their visa application, and begins looking at train schedules. I offer to come along. A cat tussle interrupts our conversation. Cat 1 is attacking Cat 2 for being inside the cat cave. Cat 1 is a disciplinarian with inflexible rules: Cat 2 is not allowed on the highest platform of the cat tower or inside the cat cave or under any blankets. Driven out of the cave, Cat 2 goes to look for more food, licks her empty dish. Cat 2 does not have any rules. She is perpetually hungry, tolerant of all kinds of handling, including being carried around like a baby. She is gormless as a sea cucumber, according to my brother.
I tackle one of the items on my to-do list: finish Mrs. Dalloway essay. First thing: type up the notes that I have in at least seven different notebooks. This so-called essay could be a book, might be a book. I started writing it before Dalloway Day in 2023, and I wrote it all day on Dalloway Day, and I have continued to write it in the nearly two years since. What does it mean to live inside a single day? It’s taking me hundreds of days to figure it out.
Husband goes out back to tend to his vegetable plantation while Kid 1 asks me for help with the Wordle. I’ve never done a Wordle and don’t have much interest in word games, but I study the puzzle: IEP. What word ends in EP? I can’t make it out. It’s like the skywriting scene in Mrs. Dalloway where all the people are in the park, looking up at the sky, trying to make out what the airplane is writing in smoke. It’s like the plane we saw the other day, dragging a sign, and GROTE was all we were able to make out. We don’t know who or what a grote is. I don’t know who or what a IEP is. I am no help, but we squint at the puzzle together. Bicep! Kid 1 finally shouts. Oh my god, of course! And then they’re onto a crossword that they’re trying to finish in another browser. What do you call a Stockholm resident? Five letters, begins with an s. This one I know. Swede.
Kid 1 is coming out of the semester, too. We are emerging from the shadow of the same semester, standing in the sudden light, blinking in surprise—but it’s not the same. They await their final grades, comments on a paper from my colleague who’s retiring after forty-three years. What if it’s the last student essay he ever reads? It’s a lot of pressure, to be part of that swan song, to be a student who wasn’t even born when he first started teaching, to be writing about books that hadn’t even been written.
11:58, and I head to the kitchen to make lunch: leftover rice with spiced ground beef, hummus out of leftover chickpeas. I unload and load the dishwasher, make another pot of tea, as I listen to Mrs. Dalloway on audiobook—the part where Peter Walsh shows up at Clarissa’s house while she’s mending her dress, thinking about her party. (Yesterday, during the henna operation, we listened to the skywriting scene, so my henna design is skywriting.)
1:07, and I knock on Kid 1’s door: lunch time. Cat 1 has gone to sleep on the cat shelf in my study, so Cat 2 luxuriates on the highest platform while she can.
1:27, and we head out for a walk, Kid 1 picking a handful of asparagus from the asparagus patch to bring with us to crunch on the way.
We talk of Man of La Mancha, how the lilacs are past their peak (but we still need to stop and smell them), the strange large eggshells that have been turning up in our backyard (duck eggs?), the books Kid 1 hopes to read for their senior comp next semester. Maybe we also talk of Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot. Maybe we quote poetry. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d. April is the cruellest month. But we’re past Lincoln’s dying, past the cruelty, for it is now May, a Monday near the middle of May. Not quite Dalloway Day, a Wednesday in the middle of June, but we’re getting there. Baby steps.
We stop at the wildflower habitat to watch the red-winged blackbirds dart and soar, cry out oak-ra-lee!
Don’t forget to eat your Mother’s Day mousse, Kid 1 tells me when we get back. There is one small ramekin left from yesterday.
2:12, and I go out in the backyard to sit with my oakling. I have been sitting with him every day since January 1. Every day, I fill at least a page in my notebook, sometimes more. Every day, I write and I draw. Every day, I try to see something new, even though for the first hundred days, nothing was happening. I wrote and drew one hundred pages of nothing, as I sat shivering in snow and rain, looking at the little tree still holding onto its marcescent leaves from fall, exhibiting no outer signs of change. The point is to sit still, to pay attention, to look, to see. The point is something I don’t even know right now, something that will emerge later, from all the quiet sitting and writing and drawing.
Once, many years ago, I embarked on a project to photograph another tree—a much larger tree—every single day for a year. I didn’t quite make it, but I did study that tree through three seasons. This project is like that, but different: photos are not the point. Because sometimes, holding a camera in front of my face obscures rather than enhances my vision. Sometimes, I let the camera see for me. Now, I must see for myself. And now, the tree is finally doing something: in the past month, it’s dropped its old leaves and sprouted new ones. The tender unfurling leaves begin with a red blush, then fade to caterpillar green as they grow and open.
3:12, and I’m back inside, reading my Dalloway notebooks on the couch, both cats with me. Cat 1 is a leg cat, making herself long in the valley of legs. Cat 2 is a face cat, always sitting as close to one’s face as possible, sometimes giving it vigorous licks.
I no longer have such a tight grip on the day; I have ceased to keep track of it with the same granularity. Time is getting away from me.
4:41, and Kid 1 and I drive across town to visit Edward the cat. Actually, Kid 1 visits Edward—catsitting job—while I go to Howard Park and find lilacs in peak bloom, geese lording over the sidewalk, a groundhog snuffling his way into a pipe.
I walk along the Riverwalk, passing dog walkers, runners, bicyclists, skateboarders, and even a very small human being carried aloft in her mother’s arms. The cries of red-winged blackbirds fill the air. A large turtle suns himself on a rock in the river but slips back in the water before I can get a picture. The rowers glide over the water, their synchronized strokes a marvel I have to stop and watch.
Reunited, we share our news. I tell of the rowers and the baby and the turtle. Kid 1 reports on Edward, who is much the same. Edward is a cat of few passions. He is skinny, uninterested in food, and slightly sinister. He poops in a bathtub, sometimes behind the couch. His one hobby is Fresh Air, so Kid 1 opens the door for him so he can sit in front of the screen door and partake of Fresh Air.
On the way home, we pick up Kid 2 from the gym, where he’s walked after school. We arrive home just in time for the cats’ 6 p.m. feeding of wet cat food. Cat 1 is beside herself with anticipation as I open the can. She will wolf down all of her portion, then wait for Cat 2 to finish giving her food several indifferent licks before wandering away. Then, Cat 1 will swoop in to finish what’s left. Cat 2, that carb-loving connoisseur of dry food, goes over to her food dispenser and waits for the next allotment.`
After dinner, Kid 2 and I go on a walk. We talk about going to the nature area to look for pawpaws in the fall, about the food we ate last year on our Moosewatch expedition on Isle Royale and the food we should pack this time, about the paper he’s writing on Hamlet in which he intends to examine what contemporary laws the characters broke and how trials might unfold in modern courtrooms. Would Claudius be convicted for murder? Hamlet? Is there enough evidence? What would a jury decide?
7:00, and Kid 1 declares that it’s hammock time, so we go into the backyard. Kid 1 climbs into their hammock with a Seamus Heaney book while I sit with my oakling again.
I give in to the urge to put the macro lens on the camera and capture closeups of the new leaves. There’s still plenty of light; on this western edge of the Eastern time zone the sun sets late in spring and summer. Precious! Precious! Suddenly voices ring out from adjacent yards. Precious! Our neighbors are on the prowl, calling for their missing dog. Soon enough, Precious is found, and then just birdsong fills the air. A few stray raindrops splatter down.
7:48, and when I go back inside and sit on the couch, I am instantly festooned with cats.
Husband is sitting at the dining room table, cutting mats for his latest project: a custom frame for a triptych Kid 1 created in drawing class depicting the dozens of plants they nurture in their room.
8:00, and the thunder of Final Dinner dispensing makes Cat 2 run off, but Cat 1 continues snoozing in the valley of legs. I work on my Dalloway essay, returning again to the question: how to put all of life into a single day? How to pull that off? How did Virginia Woolf do it?
8:45, and the kids and I head to the basement to watch an episode of the Twilight Zone before bed, which allows me to live in the uncanny valley of Rod Serling’s mind, to experience the double patina of nostalgia: first, the original feeling of my childhood when I watched the Twilight Zone during the all-day marathons on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and how I would long for the simple times depicted in the show, the Main Streets and wholesomeness, a time and place that always had only one distinct problem that could be easily summed up by Rod Serling’s reassuring voiceover, and second, my current nostalgia for my 1980s childhood when a Twilight Zone marathon was enough to give me unbridled joy for an entire day.
9:47, and we’re back from the basement. I go online to log my daily miles—six—in the Great Virtual Race Across the States. I’ve been racing across the states for one year and twelve days. I’m currently in region 4 of 5, having completed 2135.8 miles out of 3361 total miles. I’ve been through Delaware, Washington, DC, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and now I’m in Colorado. As I walked today with the kids in our neighborhood and through Howard Park and along the river, my virtual racing self left Poncha Springs, on the way to Maysville, soon to be passing the Mountain Spirit Winery on 220. The land there is dry and scrubby, hilly; I’m on a two-lane road with blue sky and white puffs of clouds, the skeleton of an old billboard on the side of the road, and as we walk all over Chicago tomorrow, and the Indiana Dunes next month, and California in July, and as we embark on Moosewatch and hunt for moose bones all over an island national park in the middle of Lake Superior in August, I will simultaneously be moving through Colorado and into Utah, my real journey and my virtual journey unspooling side by side in my mind.
Before bed, Kid 2 shows off his new toothbrush from the new dentist, a fancier model than he’s seen before, with a squishy button on the handle that’s fun to press, even if it doesn’t do anything, and we all marvel at his new toothbrush, and I think that I would never have remembered this conversation, this amazing new toothbrush, if today wasn’t My Day, and even if it isn’t Dalloway Day, even if it’s just a Monday in mid-May, it’s been a pretty good day, and then at 10:39 we all go to bed.
Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of a collection of essays, Xylotheque (University of New Mexico Press), and a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Terrain, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Short Reads, Blue Mesa Review, The Fourth River, Glimmer Train, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. Her new essay collection is being published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026.