Expandable.

Don't you wish, sometimes, that there was a greater elasticity in the day? A capacity, a commensurability of the available hours with the things we want to do, beyond the things we must do?

I thought this as I trudged--there's no other word for it--from my car to the basement of the library. I was on the west of the building, but in the shadow of the walk way between two tallish buildings. The sun was still low in the east. It was cold.

I thought, I will be in that basement for six hours. Because it was the truth, and also because I was feeling the tiniest bit whiny about it, at the outset.

Although I enjoyed much about them, and although I accomplished a lot during those hours, I wished nonetheless that those six hours had had a little break in them. (a lunch-sized, or even a snack-sized break.)

I wished that, in the consultations which pushed up against each other, cheek, as they say, by jowl, there had been a small sane breath, one that allowed for thought.

I thought about slowing down, to see something, to open my eyes, to find a picture, an image. To capture it, or even just to see it.

On my way out to the car at the end of the day, I saw a boy who must have cut through campus on his way home from school. He had a big branch, probably broken from a tree. He was driving it into an icy snowbank created, no doubt, weeks ago from the plows clearing the lots after the last snowfall. He was standing on the snow, dislodging divots of snow and flicking them into the air. I wasn't close enough to see them hit the pavement, but I imagine they shattered, or broke, anyway.

As I neared my car, he looked up. He smiled at me. I smiled back. He turned back to his work/play. Like a farmer, cultivating the ground? Like someone digging to unearth something? Or just like a kid, inventing a game out of a stick and snow.