It seems so far away: that last day where you stacked up all your papers, wrote your last email, and washed your tea mug. You had pulled out of the office parking lot, listening to country music, leaving your lesson plans and paper grading behind, if only for a week.

Between then and now there has been long afternoons reading novels, late mornings sleeping in, and stretches of hours cooking and yoga-ing and home improving.  There were no high heels or stockings or tailored clothes.  Only loose shirts and leggings.  No hair wound into a perfect bun held together by too many pins--only long tendrils of hair splayed against your back, falling as they will.

As the hours unfold into days, you begin to let go of the little snags and hooks that clung to you during the last few months.  You see them for what they are: little tiny ephemeral bits of your job and that come as go as often as the semesters.  Slowly you begin to realize that these pieces do not make up you, do not make up your job.  They are merely the dust and crumbs of your day.

Now you see, in the time between watching old movies and goofing around, that you have washed off that debris and, in fact, are looking forward to dawning your teacher clothes and your long necklaces and the many rings your naked fingers long for.  It is time to return to your calling, time to once again enter the world as a force for good.