Spring Review 2023

I've kept a hexagon fish tank off Craigslist since about 2012. I called our group of Tetras we were given by a friend "the cartel", and the aquatic creatures were unkillable and prolific enough over the years that annually I had to give away the extra fish, plants, and snails that propagated. Then something changed during the pandemic, and the fish quit breeding. I tried everything in 2021 and 2022 for them - blood worms, fry hides, pH checks, a new filter and pump.

By the time we moved into the rental townhouse, we were down to just three tetras, and I was resigned to providing a quality hospice aquarium for the remainders. Then in early March I saw the first baby tetra in three years. Now there are two babies. I don't know what changed. Maybe everything.

In a few months, my first peer reviewed article in ten years will be published. It's my first professional publication in six years. The piece on how digital licensing counts affect library funding will be in an obscure journal, and my two co-authors are at a different workplace than mine. I kept trying to give away the lead author spot, as I have done with other group articles in the past. The co-authors kept giving it back. The article went through a couple of different professional publication reviews before finding a home. Not sure exactly what changed to make the work publishable, except persistence on the side of the co-authors to find the study a place in print.

Next weekend, I'll start working with a local parade Krewe to build my first lantern in six years. This will be my first big lantern build in eight years. The oldest daughter is building a lantern as well, her first in the same amount of time. We always meant to do this again, but there were all the things over the last six years that stopped us.

I don't know why the fish are making babies once more. I don't know what makes one publication take an article over another. I don't know why it took me so long to push myself forward on parade krewe work. I only know good things are happening.

I'm typing this as I listen to a high school choir perform "Call of the Flowers", which is lovely. In the row of seats before me, my youngest daughter sits, waiting for her turn to take the stage. All around me are the children I’ve watched grow at a distance the same time as mine. I don't feel like I know as many of the kids as I should. In a few years they'll all be in very different places, because everything will have changed again. It's their Spring concert, and I'm in a completely different seasonal cycle, sweating through the end of my own personal heat wave.

I feel like my long season of summer storms is almost done. I started a counter on my phone before Christmas to my 50th birthday, and I check it every few weeks, watching the numbers roll inexorably toward the third quarter of my life, the autumn. I can't wait for the end of the high temperatures, the next big real Change, not disaster, but something I know is coming but can't feel the shape of or name of yet.

I know everything will be different in three years, and not just because all the children around me will have graduated. These kids will have become the same kind of seeds on the wind I was when I started blogging in my own Spring. I'll have found my own new adventure by that time as well.

My youngest daughter and all the other performers are now wrapping up the show with Sunday by Sondheim. The seniors on stage have roses. One of the parents behind me is crying. We are all on the edge of marvelous changes, all the time. The aquarium that I thought was on life support was just on pause. I suppose I was, too.