“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, ” and go till you come to the end; then stop.”

— From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

Friends, this is the end: I’m retiring Distances Between Ports. Fortunately, it’s also the beginning: I’m launching The Science Essayist.

Eventually the archives of this site will probably move somewhere else, but for now they remain, and I thank you with all my heart, readers-mine, for being my companions here these past five years— you know who you are. I really hope you’ll follow me where I go next.

What it is like, you see, is that feeling you get when you have—through several fluctuations of decision and neglect—let your hair grow too long, and it has taken to curling over your ears in a way that you dislike, and scratching the back of your neck so that you are never cool even when the wind kisses past. Dull and dry because it is not only dead now but old, too, it hangs heavy on your person like something you begin to want desperately to lose.

It’s not hard to fix that feeling. You just have to be brave, find a pair of scissors, and snip.

I thought I would just put down here, readers-mine, since I do use this space as a kind of memory-capsule, and who knows—I may wish to remember this time when I am extremely old and ready to laugh about it—that

1) Bad Stuff is happening with work. The Global Economic Meltdown (or GEM, as Ross likes to call it) we have all been hearing so much about is currently busily melting away a rather large corner of my pants, and I do not like it, not one bit.
2) I am slightly preoccupied with the Bad Stuff.
3) I hope to stop being preoccupied with the Bad Stuff very soon, and start channeling it all into Productivity! Creativity! and Various Other Important -ivities!
4) Please note: The Bad Stuff is not going to kill me. If you’re thinking about getting your broadsword out and charging over to defend me, put away the thought. I do not need anything, except for a series of strong drinks and a new pair of pants.

Of course, you should feel free to shoot me a line at any time if you have paying writing work to offer me. My experience includes, but is not limited to, witty and mildly literary emails, break-up letters, post-break-up letters, welcome signs, amusing grocery lists, to-do-lists for depressive people, captions for stick-figure doodles, questions for the ages, and self-deprecating Facebook status updates. Contact me to discuss specific project proposals.

Today I lay on my back in the sun and read.

I swung on a a swing with such delight that a 13-year-old girl swinging languidly next to me was moved to utter to her friends, with an air of great disdain, “That girl really likes swinging, yo. She’s enjoyin’ herself!”

I went to yoga and rocked the bow pose.

I had lunch with Ross on the grassy lawn of the main quadrangle of the university, the sun so bright and hot on our backs we began to be covered in a thin film of sweat. The year’s first sweat—it should be divine, so sweet we could bathe in it—but instead it feels almost like a punishment. Then you froze, now you shall burn. Bodies are so temperamental.

I put my ailing rosemary in a proper pot (why is rosemary always ailing? It’s as if it doesn’t think Chicago’s weather is as healthy as the weather in the Mediterranean, or something) and cleaned out last season’s roots and dead branches from two other pots; I saved as much soil as I could from those, to make a ready place for the nasturtiums I’m going to plant tomorrow and the tomatoes Megan is slowly coaxing from seed.

While repotting the rosemary, a piece of grit flew into my left eye, sharp as a needle, and I could not get it out for half an hour, flush as I might. Finally, I thought it might be better to let a professional maul my eye for me (and make sure I didn’t have a corneal abrasion), and as I sat in the office of the nearest optometrist, waiting to pay a hundred dollars for him to get the piece of dirt out for me, I blinked hard and out it came. I should have asked Ross to lick it out for me; that would have been a sign of true love.

While flushing and blinking and swearing at the tiny piece of dirt in my eye, my friendly UPS guy arrived bearing my new wedding ring, and undoubtedly thought I was in the midst of some horrible emotional crisis, red-eyed and teary and sniffly-nosed. But the ring is marvelous: wide and matte and slightly concave. It feels good to have it around my finger.

To celebrate the fact that gardening did not make me go blind, Ross and I picked up some of this at the store and mixed the first summer drinks of the year to imbibe on the back porch. I made them strong. Really strong. So strong I was willing to write to you here, though I swore not to.

Sun is life. Heat is life. I am here and alive and, if not well, then at least beautifully, deliciously warm.

I’ve been a frequently absent host here at my own party for a while now, and dropping in to say hello to you all over these past few months I have felt a little more shy every time, trying out my voice just a little to see if it still works and then vanishing before anyone can tug on my shirtsleeve and bid me stay longer.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in the waning light of our living room while wet chunks of snow, rain, and hail fell from the sky, a sudden desire to hear a particular Simon and Garfunkel song came upon Ross, as it does; a half hour later he had the album in question in his possession, as you do. Listening to it now, I recall many waning evenings spent kneeling of the floor of my parents’ bedroom in my late childhood, playing “Silent Night/7-O’clock News” over and over—trying to catch the low murmur of tragedy in the background of the hymn.

Ross’s song was “Patterns.”

The night sets softly with the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows on the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle, or a child’s uneven scrawl.

And the pattern still remains on the wall where darkness fell,
And it’s fitting that it should, for in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin, or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled.

Cheery pair, Paul and Art.

Please remind me not to spend an hour reading emails from my early twenties when life was dramatic and I was poetic. It will only end with me suddenly looking up amidst the fog of memory and realizing that I haven’t written a word of the thing I was supposed to write, and it’s not as if I have very much time to work these days anyway, since the cat has trained me exquisitely well to scratch the sides of her head every time she wakes up from a nap, which is approximately fifty times a day.

Thank you.