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268 24 Out from Cricklewood The squirrels have become giddy with late summer: somersaulting on the knoll across the street, chasing after apple green walnuts. Crickets and cicadas hum and buzz with humidity. In the evenings, Ron and I sit on the porch, looking across at the walnut tree, graceful against the sky even in the heavy August air. Since he and I returned from our most recent trip to London, I have wandered through my summer days, thinking about the past, lost in inner reflection. In the mornings, I pick up the crystal and cradle it in the palm of my hand before returning it to the front window to split the morning sun. I know that this time of introspection will soon come to an end. The parking lot will fill with cars; the campus will fill with students. Resisting thoughts of the college, I dawdle among summer memories: Ron’s and my June visit to Kara and Andrzej, when we haunted London streets and went—the four of us—for a weekend in Paris, my initiation into the glamours of that city. Or I muse over my return to Bloomsbury to mingle with other impassioned scholars at the Virginia Woolf conference, the first to be held in her own neighborhood. I return, too, to that deeper past nineteen years ago: May 1985, the arrival of spring after the earth had turned its way through the seasons of the London year with Kara and Adriane, the three of us leaning inward toward each other. As spring came on, the sun, which had lingered just at roofline over the flats in Midland Terrace through December, rose incrementally. The days lengthened; our Cricklewood adventure neared its end. ON T H E MOR N I NG OF M A Y 2, I waved good-bye to a taxi headed toward Euston station: Kara and Adriane departing for a four-week tour of Europe with Lawrence and his friend Kirstina, whom I had finally, nervously, agreed OU T F ROM C R IC K L E WO OD | 269 to host. Just as Lawrence had insisted when he phoned that winter, the five of us had managed to share a roof for four days in reasonable compatibility: no eruptions of anger from Lawrence, much good grace from Kirstina, excited anticipation for Kara and Adriane—and my own measured calm. On that same afternoon—by a quirk of timing over which I must have had some control—I again sent off the manuscript of my book on which I had been working doggedly, revising, finalizing, lately without energy or interest. Through much of April, with Kara and Adriane off at school, I had sat alone at my desk, staring blankly at the wall. In front of me had sat the manuscript—final copy, retyped on the used Olympia—stacked neatly on top of the substratum of scattered note cards, draft pages, revised endnotes, xeroxed articles. From this detritus had surfaced the new version. But I had had to force myself to do the endnotes, the revised conclusion, the bibliography before I had finally been able to copy the entirety and post it off to Ann Arbor on the same day I sent my daughters off for their European vacation. That was already nearly a week after I had stood in the doorway of our flat, smiling as I watched a simpler departure: Kara and Adriane setting off for their final day of school, hand in hand, a spring in their step, prepared to end their London adventure at the conclusion of winter term. So many departures , so much pull outward from the safe seclusion behind the blue door. A L ON E , I tried not to envy my daughters on their excursion to Ireland, Germany, Italy, Paris; I tried not to envy their father, sharing these new experiences with them. Alone, I sought ways to make this new aloneness my own. Now I would reclaim my solitude, return to my work, and await the return of my daughters, anxious that they not suffer undue stress in traveling with their father or unforeseen danger in taking on these new ventures. But I needed as well to venture out on my own, to expand beyond the cloistered life I had been living of late. One Sunday—finally a sunny day—I set out modestly to Regent’s Park, traipsing in and out and around and then up to the canal and along the bank. I...

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