Rather than spending the morning working on my doctoral dissertation project, I instead try to understand a birch tree. I gaze out of my dirty office window in avoidance, past the wood, stacked in military rows on either side of my view, across the jumble of chairs and boxes of shovels, over the tops of the silk flower arrangement, through the tall screened windows of the porch. My eyes come to rest upon two immature birch trees, chalky bark etched with time lines, most leaves fallen. The trunks are thin and pencil-straight; the branches extend in right and left angles and droop and sag like dog or cat tails. The ash in front of the birch refuses to make way for winter; the scarlet leaves clinging to its spindly branches will eventually drop and embrace the pointed needles of the pine before landing on the damp ground. The almost imperceptible rustling of leaves is intermittent against the deep stillness surrounding the day. The lack of wind is accompanied by a faded sunlight that emphasizes the death of summer, the impending birth of snow and winter. We will soon have no colors--only muted grays and dulled whites, like an ancient and faded photograph with bleak, indistinguishable images. Everything will be either frozen still or dead. Winter doesn't procrastinate about its arrival the way I do about writing. I've become a master at shirking the work required for this intellectual project. Someone suggested that I have not been effectively working on my dissertation project because of anxiety about accomplishing this large task. Actually, one of my chapters about being sexually harassed is proving much more emotionally difficult than I previously thought it would be, and is probably more the reason that I continuously stall. Odd that I am having trouble writing about what happened, especially since I have ingrained, unforgettable memories of it regardless of its having occurred so many years ago. The sequence of the story seems straightforward enough. I graduated from college, found my first job in middle management for a Fortune 500 company where I end up dealing with my supervisor's unwanted sexual advances, putting up with it until I could no longer do my job, my reluctant decision to report him, the results of this decision, and, ultimately, my resignation. But when it comes to actually discussing the emotional aspect of these events--it's here where silence overpowers me. Perhaps the cautionary statements from some of my colleagues about sexual harassment being too political play into my difficulty. I may likely have trouble finding an academic position if I choose to write a dissertation about this issue, I've been told. These negative statements return to haunt me often; I find myself repeating them as though they were mantras. I understand now why a professor from my master's program said that it made no sense to pursue a doctorate--so much bloody work and frustrating as hell! I must reach beyond this inertia and work, but I would rather allow my mind simply to wander where it likes. I continue to study the trees as they ready themselves for winter's snow. The pine needles aren't as green as in summer; all of the pines look washed out and faded. There are a few gold apples hanging on to the limbs of an apple tree. These apples are unwilling to let go and die, much as the death of my motivation envelopes me and doesn't let go. Instead, I give in to the temptations of silence. My husband, David, talks with glee about bringing more wood in from outside to stack on the porch to ready us for winter. He is excited and ecstatic that we are closing in on this cold and gray time of year. David builds fires in the wood-burning stove every time the temperature dips below 60 degrees; he anticipates winter with a positive energy I don't understand. We argue playfully over the temperature inside the house when he prematurely gets a blaze going--he tells me to wear shorts rather than complain that it's a sauna-like atmosphere within. I tell him that the season for wearing shorts is over. Perhaps as I exchange shorts for sweaters and mittens, I will reconnect to the act of writing. I had plenty of excuses this summer for not writing. We collected agates from Lake Superior on days when David provided this excuse for me to get away from my writing desk. We collected many rocks and stones--buckets and bags full of a multitude of colors--reds, yellows, oranges, purples, grays, brown and tan, turquoise or blue. Large ones so heavy that David had to haul them to the car with both hands, some so small we often lost them from tiny, almost imperceptible, holes in the plastic bags in which they were carried. I put the smaller ones in jars and baskets and then placed them in various corners of the house. Larger ones now serve as doorstops and paper weights. I also use these stones to make Christmas presents--jewelry and refrigerator magnets, Christmas wreaths of lake driftwood and stones. David always suffers anxiety when I use my glue gun for this purpose--he grows attached to all of our gathered stones. After several moves to new dwellings in the last three years, we now try to restrain ourselves from taking rocks away from their cold sand, or at least to reduce the number we bring home. Keeping these rocks around entices me to ignore my scholarly work whenever possible. Now I need a similar symbol to encourage me to get serious about my dissertation. My task has been made more difficult by my decision to include an autobiographical chapter discussing my experiences. Traditionally, dissertations avoid autobiography. Maybe I was too hasty. Can any woman ever fully capture with words how being sexually harassed feels and how it lingers in our minds? What language, academic or otherwise, can tell this story?