Desert Magnolia

The English language continues to morph over time. Cultural attitudes, technology, political events - they all play into a constantly evolving lexicon from which we draw. One of my big concerns revolves around the truncation of words and the deliberate absence of punctuation in texts, a phenom that I've also seen leaking into personal emails..and that makes me shiver. Using appropriate style for different venues makes sense, I just wonder where the line will be drawn, if it will be drawn at all or if our more formal missives will eventually resemble stream of consciousness flows of words sans commas and parens and periods and such. Will it all become like a bad homage to e e cummings with the added twist of no instructions for how to weight or pace, and therefore truly understand written thoughts? Will we end up masters of poetic interpretation in spite of our notable avoidance of iambic pentameter or haiku structure? I am a language lover, and spent far too many hours studying...

This week marks one of two between terms. I plan to work as much as possible, relax a bit, regroup a lot, and generally catch my breath after the maelstrom of the last semester. I am coming off the emotional high of having my daughter home for a few days - she decided to surprise us and spent Easter weekend here. It was a birthday gift to her dad and me, and we are both absolutely delighted she decided to make the trek.  We watched movies, we hung out and said a lot and sometimes absolutely nothing, we ate wonderful meals and basically basked in being together again. She left very early this morning, and is almost home. She is, by now, on a train between Boston and Providence, and will be back in her apartment before the sun sets. She faces the final weeks of her college career, interviews with potential employers, final exams, and of course the nonstop celebration that Seniors enjoy as they face a very scary future - the unknown - and leave the relative safety of college life...