March

Question: Which calendar date is also a command?

Answer: March fourth. March forth!

Dane likes to remind me of this little pun every spring, so that I'll know that he's clever. I have long experience with his sense of humor, so I smile and nod, and hope hard that he doesn't follow up with the Monk Joke. (Note: For your safety, I recommend that you NEVER ask Dane about the Monk Joke. However, if you must, do it when I'm not around.)

But March! The sometimes-spring-time, sometimes-winter month. It always gives me a sense of de ja vu. It's the month of tiny green things appearing in the shadows of dry leaves and brown grass. It's the month of sudden three-foot snow storms. And coltsfoot. And wood frogs. Dreary rain and ice and fog, and sudden sunshine.

Fourteen years ago in March, Dane and I took a drive to watch comet Hale-Bopp. A few days later, I took a walk by myself, danced a little jig on a fallen log, and fell in a pond full of frog eggs. I was seventeen! It was almost spring time! I was in love! Falling in a pond seemed like the right response to it all. Besides, I'd fallen in the same pond many times before -- hoping the rotten March ice was still good for skating, or playing Tarzan in the rhododendron with my brother. It's not that deep.

A few days ago, I walked across that same old log, in that same old pond, and carefully didn't fall in, because Duncan was strapped to my back. Doing it, I felt that despite all the troubles in Japan, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, etc., all was right in my world. Last year March was the month of a cross-country trip, and a hard week-and-a-bit (can that be all?) with Duncan in the hospital. And this year? Two babies walking. Dane laughing in the garden. Green things poking through dry leaves. Wind rushing in the trees. Sparkling pond water. Wood frogs and spring peepers. Coltsfoot and bloodroot and daffodils. The whole beautiful world getting ready to be explored. March forth, little boys!

On a more prosaic note, March is also the month of LPSC -- the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. I've gone every spring for the past eight years, and this year was no exception. Would March be March without a trip to Houston? Without a couple of hours (or several!) spent sitting on the tarmac at IAH and a few too many Texas-sized meals? Maybe not.

I haven't written anything about work since I quit my fellowship, and I expect some of my friends are curious what I've been up to on that front. I'll say frankly that I haven't thought about work that much. My whole life used to revolve around knowing an awful lot about ground ice on Mars, and now it doesn't. Stepping outside of academia for six months has given me a fresh perspective on my career, and I've realized two things. One: The work I spent my adult life doing isn't really that important. It's a tiny trivial thing that will affect almost no one, improve no one's life. Devoting so much of myself to it was, in some ways, a silly indulgence. And Two: I still really like it. Even love it a little.

In the thick of work and sleep deprivation, I couldn't see either of those things. It's lovely to see them now. Before I left NASA, I helped my adviser there write a proposal that would let me continue my fellowship research part time from home. Through some good fortune, it was funded. And through some greater good fortune, a scientist at NRAO (who I worked for in high school) heard that I was moving back to West Virginia and offered me office space. So, only a few months after committing what seemed like career suicide, I have money, an institutional home, and a toe wedged in the door that might have closed. Will I be able to take advantage of the opportunity? Will I really be able to make effective use of that one silent office day each week? Will I want to fight hard enough to build up a funding stream and be a full-time scientist again by the time the kids go to school? Or will I decide to go another direction? I don't know.

What I do know is that I had a wonderful time at LPSC. It was so good to see the people again. All the smart, interesting, and very dear people, who were part of the fabric of everyday for all those years in Colorado, and the one blurry year in California. I arrived in Houston sleep deprived, and I left sleep deprived. There was so much to catch up on. I had to hear all about everyone's new babies, new spouses, new houses, new jobs, and new science. I had to admire them all, so busy, excited, and well. So interested in life, and so interested in the nooks and cranies of the solar system that they were currently obsessing about. My people; my solar system.

Last year at LPSC, deep in the fog of the first year with twins, still suffering from what a friend calls "the lactation lobotomy," not even knowing yet about the horrors of teething, I wondered if I would ever be one of those people again. The smart, alert, engaged, motivated people I so admired. But this year, suddenly the mother of two little boys, not twin infants, I snapped back into my old self. The synapses were firing again. I found myself obsessing happily about my own little nook of the solar system, the upper two meters of the high-latitude Martian regolith. (Say that five times fast.) I felt all the excitement of seeing new data, and of being one of only a handful of people in the room who understood the nuts and bolts of a particular problem really well. The only difference from past years was that I appreciated the feeling more -- and I appreciated my choice to make the pursuit of it a smaller part of my life. I could sit in a chair in Houston and revel in the nerdiness, but look forward to putting all that aside and going home to knitting and playing in the mud.

I don't want to imply that I've achieved some sort of harmonious balance between work and life. I'm TERRIBLE at balance. But being at the conference and seeing all my friends made me feel that there was hope of balance. It made me feel that even if doing part-time science was dooming myself to failure, having a go was worth a try. It made me feel that, at least for now, I should . . . well, march forth!

(Oh, come on. You knew I wouldn't resist.)