My Sunday mornings begin with waffles and the New York Times. I read the Week in Review and Sunday Magazine while Jack warms real maple syrup on the stove and mixes the batter. He pours orange juice for both of us and sets out the whipped cream. Sometimes he stops cooking for a moment to read over my shoulder or to love on me a little.

This time is ours. It’s time to catch up after a week of contrasting schedules. (He has a real job; I deliver pizzas.) It’s time for us to go beyond the day-to-day, “We need more milk,” “I’ll do laundry tonight,” utilitarian conversations. We let the news and the waffles help us recharge.

After breakfast, we sometimes go to a local coffee shop. There, with the hum of other people’s conversations and soft music setting the mood, I take in a hazelnut mocha (blended, no whip) and more of the newspaper. While drinking an iced coffee, Jack strikes up easy conversations with other patrons. He talks about home owners’ associations and national news events. He shares stories from his life and commentaries on local events. He makes friends and, occasionally, humors me as I read something aloud. He endures my fact checking questions (How can there be an odd number of twins?) and lowers the window shade or hands me his sunglasses when I start to squint.

We sit like that, reading and chatting and making fun of each other and enjoying our coffee and each other’s company until it’s almost time for me to go to work. At about 10:30, we rush home so I can throw on a green polo and black pants and grab tennis shoes. Then we head off to another day of opposite schedules.

But first I get my Sunday morning, with good food, good news and a good man.

Yesterday I missed the train. It’s a short story. I was planning to catch the 4:13 train. But there was no 4:13 train. There was a 4:03 train, which I chased fruitlessly along the platform. The next train would be too late to get me into town in time to teach my yoga class.

I spent a moment wondering why, when all the other trains run thirteen minutes after the hour, the 4:03 train had to be different. I spent a moment berating myself for not double-checking the timetable before I left the house. I spent a moment contemplating calling my boyfriend, before I realised that he couldn’t get me into town either and although I wanted a little sympathy what I really needed was a plan.

I considered my options. They were few. I have no car, there are no buses from our village and the next train would be too late. It was too far to walk or bike, at least in the time available. I glanced across to the highway on the other side of the railway tracks. I watched the cars whizzing by on their way into the city. I realised there was only one way for me to get to my class on time. I was going to have to do something I hadn’t done since I was backpacking around Africa more than ten years ago. I was going to hitchhike.

I felt a moment of hesitation. Would I be safe? Was I about to do something really foolish and end up as a headline in the evening news? Probably not. I decided to take a chance on good fortune and the kindness of strangers. I walked to the end of the train platform and crossed the busy highway. When I got to the other side I turned around to face the oncoming traffic and thrust my arm out, thumb up.

I had been there for about thirty seconds when a car pulled out of the village onto the highway and immediately pulled over in front of me. I walked up to the vehicle and bent down to open the door. The driver was a woman in her forties or fifties. She didn’t look up at me but, keeping her eyes on the road, asked “Where are you going?” In the passenger seat was a black curly-haired dog who watched me with anticipation.

“I’m going to the city,” I replied, “I just missed the train.” “Well, I’m only going as far as Porirua,” she responded, “but there are plenty of trains from there.”

“Great,” I said as I bent to climb in. The dog leapt over into the back seat but as soon as I was settled she jumped back and perched on my lap. She was not a small dog. The woman scolded her affectionately and eventually she conceded the seat to me and retreated to the back.

“I’m Alison” she said.

“I’m Marianne. Thanks again for picking me up. I was a bit stuck there.”

All the way to Porirua we talked about composting toilets, wetback wood burners, solar panels, water storage tanks and household sized windmills. We shared an interest in making our homes as self-sufficient and environmentally kind as possible. We talked about the council’s efforts in the 1980s to put our village onto sewage systems, rather than the septic tanks we (thankfully) still have. The problem, Alison pointed out, with a town sewage system is that the developers can come in and build high-rise and multi-unit properties. It’s harder to do that on a septic tank.

As we pulled into Porirua I was telling Alison about the community yoga class I teach in the village hall and she was telling me that she had been meaning to come along for months. We arrived across the stream from the train station just moments before the 4:03 train did, so I ran across the bridge and through the tunnel under the tracks and made it up onto the platform just in time to leap onto the train before the doors shut again.

As we rolled away towards the city I smiled because missing the train is one thing, but missing the moment would have been much sadder.

Parting acids duct their way into the bottoms
Side by side down the milky slipstream

A sliver of membrane
A rattle behind those white towers

Oily posture collecting in the tidepools
The favored sun a glint and wet shadow

Three drops to the surface
A broken ocean blanket ruined with vermillion

Peasants milling in the bleached surf
Parched mouths open with salty breath

Staunch grooves deep in those leathery walls
Now barren aqueducts abused by the reef

Gulls cry and drop down to bury their song
Tearing wasted resources in unmanageable bites

Riffraff sounds and rambling language of the sea
Culling songs for their wayward spawn

A carrion gift to the naive and indifferent

A fetish for the gawking seaweed children
Nourished in the belly of its great divide

Homecoming is supposed to be a time to reconnect with old friends and relive the traditions and adventures of our school days, but homecoming also has a hidden agenda – forcing us to admit that we are getting old. I am still a young man, but each time I return to my alma mater I am reminded of how much older I have gotten since I left.

Lauran and I parked behind the business school in a spot I surely parked in many times before. We were late; the bonfire was already burning down to embers. Families were already leaving. When I was a student at Baylor, I was always early to everything. I never wanted to miss a moment. I could get ready to go anywhere in five minutes. Now, I rarely am ready to leave the house in thirty minutes. Marriage has really slowed me down somehow, burdened me with responsibilities. We had to take our dog to stay with some friends. It took longer than expected (as everything seems to now). We missed the entire homecoming pep rally. My younger self would have been angry at me, but I just didn’t care. We found our friends, said hello, and took a brief stroll around campus before heading to the bed-and-breakfast we stayed in for the weekend.

As we strolled around campus, we noticed a large group headed towards the campus auditorium. I remembered that Pigskin Revue, Baylor’s popular homecoming musical show, always started after the pep rally. It was about 10:00PM. Lauran asked, “Isn’t that late? How long does it last?” I too was surprised by the lateness of the show. I rarely stay out past midnight, and we were planning to wake up early to attend the homecoming parade at 8:00AM, an ungodly hour for college students. It is one homecoming event where the alumni and their families far outnumber the students. When I was in college, I rarely went to bed before 1:00AM. Now I can’t even remember the last time I saw 1:00AM. It was probably New Year’s, and I was probably tired and cranky. Lauran doesn’t believe me when I tell her I used to stay up late all the time.

As a student, the central part of homecoming weekend for me was the football game. Baylor has a longstanding homecoming tradition of losing football games in glorious fashion. I was always a loyal fan, sitting through every losing effort, refusing to leave until the end of the game, even if the team had clearly gone home after the first quarter. I always held onto the foolish hope that the next game would be better, that the team was only a few good players away from contending, that a couple of lousy calls by the refs could be blamed for most of our losses. My friends and I used to get angry at the alumni who barely made noise as they sat on the opposite side of the stadium. We scoffed at the way they got cranky if people stood in their way. We scorned when they left after halftime. After the game got out of hand, we entertained ourselves by mocking the stodgy alumni.

Now I rarely attend Baylor sporting events. This football game is the first I have attended in two years. The last couple of times I have gone, I have sat in the alumni section. There was a time after I graduated that I still refused to sit there even if my ticket said I should. Now I prefer it to the rowdy student section because I don’t have to stand the whole time, and I don’t feel pressured to cheer loudly or scream on opponents’ third down attempts. An older man a few rows beneath us screamed at some ushers to move because they were in his way, and he didn’t want to stand up to see. I laughed when I realized I had joined the stodgy old alumni who are eternally pessimistic about Baylor football and who leave games early. We were out of the parking lot before the game was technically over, but in reality, the game was over by the end of the first quarter, par for the course at Baylor conference games.

After the game, we met with some friends at a deli in the suburbs of Waco. We didn’t want to go to the one near campus because we feared it might be too crowded and noisy. One of my friends joked, “We are going to need child care next time we get together.” There were four kids there already, and our group was only half its normal size, probably because it is getting harder for us to get together now that so many of my friends have small children. I believe the count is up to nine kids now, but honestly, I have started to lose track of them all. I watched as one of my college buddies sent his daughter to time out and then sat down and talked to her about her behavior. I still can’t believe it really happened. I am accustomed to seeing my friends feeding babies now, but it still surprises me when I see people my age having to discipline children. It wasn’t that long ago that we were the ones in need of guidance, or was it?

I have another homecoming under my belt now, and it’s probably about time for me to get a new belt because this old one doesn’t fit so well anymore. I already had to retire my trusty Baylor t-shirt that I wore faithfully every Saturday because I am convinced that it has shrunk drastically over the last couple of years. It’s Sunday. It feels like a good day for a nap.

I wonder what my husband thinks when he turns a corner in our house and finds my head buried in a cabinet or drawer.

Scratch that.

After sharing six homes over the course of seven years, my husband knows that when he turns a corner in our house and finds my head buried in a cabinet or drawer, he’s lost me. Sometimes for just an afternoon, other times for a few days. I’m not sure if he has come to appreciate this or see it as a sign that I’m up for OCD candidate of the year, but he accepts it nonetheless, and I appreciate that he never tries to talk me out of my not-terribly-infrequent habit of household purging. On a mild day, I’ll stick to one room; when I’m on a rampage, the entire house is up for grabs. On my last binge I spent an entire weekend culling, tossing and packing boxes bound for Goodwill, all of which amounted to two carloads of donations and four bags of trash.

That was almost two months ago, and this past weekend I was at it again in my studio. The results: one bag of trash, one bag to Goodwill, all shelves emptied, re-arranged and re-organized, and no more stray art supplies in the bathtub. It might not look remarkably different at first glance, but I see how every nook and cranny has been altered. I savor the new pockets of open space and feel less encumbered by bits and baubles I’ve hung to for years, waiting for the day that perfect project would make them indispensible.

My obsession is not difficult to understand. A close family member has a fixation at the opposite end of the spectrum, which has resulted in a house filled with so many material objects that there is literally no room to sit down. Pathways through the house are created with boxes and the few small spaces throughout the house that exist have room for only one person. I haven’t been in that house for a long time, but the memory of standing in it and feeling the weight of the loneliness that must be felt by anyone who would live in such an environment is still palpable. That house felt heavy – literally and emotionally, as if the amassing of so much stuff was the only way this person could feel a connection to the world.

It could certainly be said that I have gone too far to the other extreme; it isn’t hard to recognize those moments when this little “quirk” turns into a full-blown compulsion. I became so transfixed by the idea of emptying out at least one shelf in my studio this weekend that I could hardly think of anything else, and I knew all along that if anyone could read my thoughts they would think I had gone off the deep end. I simply had to get rid of more; it wasn’t a choice. My studio began to feel heavy, and heavy is not what I want expressed in any area of my life.

Stories of human obsessions, fixations, inclinations and addictions are a dime a dozen, and they are usually focused on attempts to overcome and release them. Rehabilitation is the goal, and anything less is failure. I’m OK with my neurosis. It doesn’t involve abusing my body, hurting those around me, or sending me into a tailspin of debt, pain and sorrow. It is what I need to do to keep myself in a space that feels light – in my home as well as my heart and mind. And pursuing what feels light and airy can’t be a bad thing, even if it makes my husband shake his head in bewilderment every once in a while.