The poet asked:
What is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The inner critic replies:
Things are what they are.
Can’t change much now.
Don’t even think about it.
The writer-soul contradicts:
What changes shall I make TODAY?
The possibilities
are exhilarating.
For, in the end,
one’s wild and precious life
is all about
craftsmanship
and
belief.
The cover of my daily planner
–with gratitude for the late Mary Oliver and her poem, The Summer Day–
September. Days growing notably shorter. Darker mornings. Sun blazing at midday, chorus of feverish buzzing from the treetops, cicadas singing loudest just before the last.
School. Children swathed in masks. Eating lunch all over the building for safe distancing. Even in a recessed section of hallway, sitting on the floor in portable blue plastic seats with built-in tabletops for food. A study in balance. Like seesaws. It takes coordination to stand up without losing what’s left of your lunch.
In the evenings, exhaustion. Everyone expresses it. Everyone. The nightly news drones on: Death and dying. Afghanistan. Hurricane destruction. Epic flooding. Rising COVID cases. Delta variant. And you might want to invest in warm clothing, Viewers. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold winter…it’s being called ‘the season of shivers‘…
Season of shivers. So poetic. I want to make something out of it, turn it around in my hand like a crystal, watch it sparkle in the light. I will hold onto it a while.
Isn’t it already a season of shivers. Church closed again, three weeks to date, as COVID struck a number of our members at once. Granddaughter in kindergarten for a week, now quarantined for two, following an exposure. Colleagues wanting to talk about intervention for students who were kindergarteners and first graders during the last year and a quarter, when instruction went virtual. A frantic clinging to norms when norms are gone. We can’t start with intervention. We must be about reinvention. Daunting.
Children. The most resilient of us all. I am sent to the cafeteria to supervise half of second grade while the other half is spread across the hallway and classrooms. Two to a table, facing the same direction. Cheerful. Chattery. They have to finish eating in time for me to clean all the tables before the next grade level arrives. I am the only staff member present. Normally there are two. Even office staff is pressed into service at lunch time, covering all locations. Skeleton crews, everywhere.
I manage it. The kids are in two lines, masked, lunch boxes in tow, awaiting their teachers. They watch me. They’re not sure what to make of me. They are quiet.
Beyond the propped cafeteria door, a balmy September afternoon. The swelling of cicada-rattles. Loud.
Do you hear that buzzing? I ask.
Nodding of masked heads. Like little bobbers on water.
Do you know which insect makes that sound?
Cockroaches! shouts a boy.
Crickets? offers a girl.
No. It’s a cicada.
They like the sound of the word. They say it aloud: Cicada.
I describe it. With my fingers: This big. Long wings. Hatches underground, climbs to top of trees. That buzzing is made by the males. It’s a love song. Doesn’t sound like a love song, does it?
Giggles. Shaking of heads.
They have questions, but their teachers have come. They must go.
Thank you for telling us about cicadas, says a girl, as her line begins snaking away.
At the door, the last boy stops, turns back: Where is that rattle, on the cicada?
In his belly, I say.
The boy nods. He runs along the sidewalk to catch up with his class.
I stand still in the shadowy silence, this momentary transition, listening to the miniature buzz-saw, helicopter-blade whirring of the cicada congregation. Loudest they’ve been all summer, just as it begins to die.
How well they must understand, cicadas, about the season of shivers.
*******
When I began writing this post, I hadn’t planned on including cicadas. They crept in of their own accord. Because I love them, and their song, I let them stay. I often write of them. Cicadas represent, among other things, personal change and transformation.
Many thanks to the Two Writing Teachers community and the weekly Slice of Life Story Challenge. Sharing our stories is also about personal change and transformation. We grow through it.
after Denise Krebs on the Ethical ELA Open Write today. Denise wrote after Langston Hughes’s poem “I Dream A World.”
—What world do YOU dream?
I dream a world
where Wisdom walks the thoroughfares
holding her lantern high
where Mercy kneels in lamplit paths
unfastening her cloak to enshroud
the transgressed
and the transgressor
where Comfort seeks out the lonely, the broken
to offer a cup of cheer, leaning in
with her elbows on the table
and her palm outstretched
where Truth looks up from the old rocker
in the corner by the bookcase
pushing his spectacles back up on his nose
as he turns the page of an ancient volume
but not before smiling at the twins
Mystery and Miracles
playing at his feet
in the flickering circle of lamplight
while Love closes the curtains
humming, always humming
her beautiful song
tears glistening like diamonds
on her cheeks
and where Judgment pauses at the door
listening, one skeletal hand raised to knock
but reconsiders
and chooses to leave
giving a curt nod to Wisdom and Mercy
and stepping aside as they pass by
—I dream a world.
Photo: “Do not be afraid…” Fan D. CC BY
This is not the post I might have written today.
Woke in the wee hours to total darkness, power loss, Hurricane Isaias smacking the house, tearing at the roof. Isaias is purely physical. He has no voice, unlike the ghost-wind that moaned and mourned for weeks under our eaves with the advent of spring and COVID-19.
Yet somewhere in the darkness, despite the raging gusts, little frogs kept up a cheery chorus.
Not much to do but stay in bed and wait it out.
And fall back asleep. And dream…
I am driving a car that belongs to my father, I think. Except that it doesn’t look like any car he ever owned. Nice little SUV, dark gray. I am coming home from visiting my grandparents in the country. I reach the quaint part of the city where they lived when I was little, before my grandfather retired. I’ve always loved this place… but I realize just now that I can’t turn the car. The steering wheel is gone. How have I managed to come so far without it? The car begins to spin and slide; I’ve lost control of it, I fear it’s going to be hit, but somehow I get it to a safe parking spot by a curb. I will have to backtrack and find that missing steering wheel—how could I have lost it? How is that even possible?
I go (on foot? in the same steerless car?) all the way back to my grandparents’ home. They’re out in the yard, very busy loading and unloading big objects (equipment? furniture?) on some kind of truck. Grandma’s face is serious. She doesn’t have time to talk to me [should have been a major clue that I was dreaming, as this never happened in reality]. When I tell her why I’m back she just says the steering wheel is over there (she points) in the road. Seems I lost it on the very start of my journey home…
I go to reclaim the steering wheel only discover two things: This is a rather large steering mechanism but the actual wheel isn’t there… and the little old road is freshly-tarred and paved. It’s never been paved. It’s supposed to be gravel. Sure, it looks nice, stretching out smooth and black, but why would anyone pave these tiny, meandering back roads where so few people live? This is a lot of work and expense that isn’t really ‘better’, I say to myself. With mounting sadness, I run a short dash on this new pavement to see that my grandmother’s home place—a small, white house with a porch and a tin roof, where Grandma and her seven siblings were born over a hundred years ago—is gone. An expanse of green grass is all there is to see…
And then I wake.
Loving symbolism as I do, I know the dream connects to having little or no control in life. We’re living through a pandemic. A hurricane rages. I work in a school and the return next week will be drastically different. Life plows on despite the loss of the familiar. Nothing looks or feels or works quite like it used to. We travel a strange road interspersed with shadows of the real and surreal. The world, and our existence, have been altered in myriad ways. But… to be without power is not the same as being powerless…
As I write, Isaias has moved on. There is no damage here, no trace of him whatsoever now. I could revel in this glorious day, the azure sky with occasional cottony clouds drifting by, the unidentifiable bird with long wings soaring high, cicadas resuming their buzzing in the still-standing trees from which they were not shaken…that sound being one that connects me more than anything to safety and my grandparents’ home in the eastern North Carolina countryside. I could employ here my one word for the year, reclamation… reclaiming the day, reclaiming life, even my strange dream-attempt at reclaiming that lost steering wheel in a vehicle that wasn’t mine…
But the power came back on and the TV is full of destruction in the northeastern regions of my state. Homes destroyed by tornadoes spawned by Isaias. People dead and missing (some were children, who’ve since been accounted for).
And I think instead that the road to reclamation is so hard, so strange, so littered with precious, scattered fragments of life, obstructed by such mountains to move. We can control so little.
When we find we are unable to steer, perhaps that is when we are being driven most toward one another. Reclamation, then, lies in our responsiveness. In our willingness.
So does, perhaps, our redemption.
Photo: The road back to Stevenage. Peter O’Connor. CC BY-SA
Written while waiting for word from the governor about schools re-opening.
Suspended animation
upended education
sense of desolation
facing the fall.
What school should be
we cannot see.
Ill winds still blowing
so much not-knowing.
Separate, there’s a cost.
So much is lost.
But not all
in one fall.
Until the surging tide
should subside
virtuality
may be reality.
Enduring
assuring
we will outlast
passing shadows cast
in empty halls
on empty walls.
By decrees
or degrees
a calling
for not falling
is conversely
full of mercy.
Choosing heartache
over heartbreak
choosing to be stronger
being a little longer
apart.
By whatever decrees
by whatever degrees
however they fall
however we start
dear ones, above all
—take heart.
Photo: Heart. Glenn Lascuna. CC BY
In the 1590s, Shakespeare penned:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried…
Now is 2020: The year of our discontent. Heavy clouds of pain, anger, injustice enshroud our houses, our cities, our minds, our days. COVID-19 cases still spike, yet to reach their peak. Flocking to the oceans no longer makes for a “glorious summer,” with crowded beaches described as ‘Petri dishes’. Many people are still out of work; some have lost their entire livelihood. Stress levels are so high, my dental hygienist tells me, that offices are being flooded with people whose teeth are cracking from grinding and whose joints hurt due to anxiety-induced inflammation. America is a nation, if not indivisible, then certainly fractured, almost soul-split (anyone recall Tom Riddle and his horcruxes?) over the complexities of recognizing and amending institutional racism to something as simple as wearing a mask. We ask: When and how can we go back to school, safely? No one really knows, although plans are being made, submitted, approved. A greater question: How can we go back to school, to life itself, as it was?
We can’t.
We must not.
Now is THE time to be discontent with what was. With what is. A time to break down and a time to build up, to reinvent, redefine, reunite.
In light of everything, a litany:
We can’t go back
to what what works for some but not all
to ideologies and theories
over actual ideas and self-actualization.
We can’t go back
to wearing blinders
to plowing on
in the same mentally-furloughed furrows.
We can’t go back
to resurrect what we’ve killed
on the altar of systemic oracles
on the sudden late revelation
therein lies no salvation.
We can’t go back
from ages and ages hence
to tell the children we’re sorry
and to plead for retroactive grace.
We can’t go back
to repaint our story.
We can only begin, here and now,
creating an inviolable mosaic
from our broken pieces.
A ‘thought mosaic’ of student reading interests at a Family Literacy Lunch event. Vitally important questions for educators and systems: How are students being honored as individuals? How much learning do students get to “own” vs. what’s delivered to them? Is greater value placed on conformity or creativity? On enduring or endeavoring? On internalizing and imitating, or imagining and innovating? Are students led to believe that their thoughts, ideas, experiences, perspectives, preferences, worries, hopes, and dreams have validity? How often do they get to reflect on these, express these, vs. being confined to and assessed on rubric responses to reading and writing prompts? Now’s the time for examining—microscopically—every standard, curriculum, practice, and program for the seeds they actually are in this organic microcosm of society.
New day. Opening window blinds to a flood of sunlight. Glimpse of pines, grass grown tall overnight (how??), weathered wooden deck railing, old white rocking chair, large cement pots draped in long ivy vines, new tendrils waving, geraniums blazing green and red, interspersed with spiky brown starbursts—oh, time to deadhead.
Within moments, scissors in hand, reaching for exposed bones of skeletal blooms, crisping, decaying, red petals shriveled, let loose, bled away, spent…
—Oh! Hello. Didn’t know you were here, Dragonfly.
Swapping the scissors for the phone-camera…
How close will you let me get?
—Surprisingly.
You’re small. Maybe two-and-a-half inches. Not like the first dragonflies I ever encountered in my grandmother’s yard when I was a child. Enormous things, terrifying… “They won’t hurt you! They eat mosquitoes”… good thing I didn’t know the old Scandinavian folktales then, how dragonflies come to weigh people’s souls, doling punishment on the bad, stitching children’s eyes closed for telling lies. Instead I learned to see the beautiful in the strange. Living sticks of metallic blue, iridescent gleams against the sunlit grass, darting any which way, impossibly. Air acrobats. —You’re very still. Not blue but yellow with bold black stripes. Clinging to a deadhead. Wonder why. Can’t cut the dying bloom away, not while you’re on it, Dragonfly. Won’t disturb you.
Returning later: You’re still present, resting on a green leaf.
Why should this feel so reassuring?
Maybe because the symbolism of a dragonfly is usually positive. You’re said to be bringers of light, restoring joy when it’s waning. Just as those bright geranium blooms are waning. Many new buds are already evident. Growth from within. The ability to change, transform, adapt—that is what we humans say about you dragonflies, as you begin life submerged in water (most of your lives being lived there) yet you eventually take to the air and learn to fly. By then the time remaining to you is short. Seems you make the most of it. Maybe you are harbingers of the soul. Not in judgment, but in self-realization, mental and emotional maturity, acceptance. A call to wisdom. A recurring word for me, of late.
Whatever motif lies written in iridescent ink on dragonfly wings, my grandmother knew it was good: You eat mosquitoes. You will not hurt me. You’re helpers. Protectors.
Sitting so still, amid decay juxtaposed with new growth… an inexplicable stab of delight, vibrant little messenger from nature, oblivious of your mission, perhaps, of nudging, not judging, human souls toward our own betterment … oh, and do you know? Could you know? In human lore… geraniums represent unexpected meetings.
About a month ago I shared this idea for a story about a little girl who loves cicadas and who’s having a hard time dealing with her parents’ separation. The girl’s name is Ada and she becomes seriously ill . . . hence the title, “Sick Ada,” cicada . . .
The story’s been gestating for a while as there were so many things to flesh out: How old is Ada? Why are her parents separated? Who left, Mom or Dad? Why? What’s the deal with her cicada fascination? How does she get sick? Most of all: Where should the story begin?
I considered writing this scene first: Near the end of the story, Ada goes into the hospital, sick enough that her recovery hangs in the balance. It is winter, when cicadas don’t sing, but she hears the heater rattling in her hospital room and believes it to be cicadas. She decides she doesn’t mind dying as long she can hear them . . .
But I am not starting there, and Ada will not die because my friend Kathleen interceded, pleading for the little girl’s life.
Amid much encouragement and a few thinly-veiled threats (thanks, Friends!), here’s the first draft opening scene.
*******
The darkness began to change.
Strips of light glimmered between the blinds until a thin finger of sunshine pushed through, reaching across Ada’s rumpled bed to caress her cheek.
At its warm touch, she opened her eyes.
Morning.
—Oh!
Ada sat straight up in bed.
It’s my birthday! I am nine.
She felt strangely old.
Sitting there in the grayness, Ada knew two certainties. Today the cicadas would start singing. They always started singing on her birthday; Daddy said it was their song of celebration for her coming into the world. He would sing to her, too, only this time it would be over the phone. He promised to call today. Next week when school was finally out, Mama would drive Ada to the airport, put her on a plane, and Daddy would be there to meet her when the plane landed. It would be her first flight.
Ada wondered if cicadas sang on the other side of the country.
The other certainty was that she wouldn’t get her biggest birthday wish of all, that Daddy would come home to stay.
*******
So, Friends, that’s how Ada’s story begins for now, rough as it is.
For the record: The cicada is an ancient symbol of change or transformation and the name “Ada” just so happens to mean “noble.”
Photo: Girl with cicada bug. Jose Hernandez. CC BY-SA
I saw his shirt from across the crowded cafeteria:
Writing my OWN story.
I hadn’t seen him before, didn’t know him, but I had to go over and say: “That’s the most awesome shirt! Do you like to write?”
He smiled and nodded, eyes bright and cheerful: “Yes!”
We had a short conversation about reading and writing. He was new to our school. After this initial encounter he was quick to come ask questions if he wasn’t sure about how we do things here, always greeting me with an earnest face and slightly self-conscious smile.
He wasn’t with us long. On his last days, he asked if he could stay after lunch and clean all of the tables as his grade level headed to recess. He wiped every table meticulously, then straightened all of the cardboard trays in the serving line for the classes to follow.
I understood.
It was something he could control. A positive and productive outlet.
I never got to write with him.
I thought about students over the years and what I learned about their lives from their writing. A girl whose family slept in their car on the journey north to visit relatives for the holidays; how she woke in the morning, shivering, to find frost coating the windows. A teenager whose vivid third-person narrative about a child born in another country, who survives abuse to find a new life and family in America . . . it switches to first person at the end as he rejoices and reveals he was that child. A first-grader who wanted to write about her dog, how the police shot and killed it. Unnerved, I told her teacher, in hopes that this was just a disturbing fabrication. It wasn’t. The child saw it happen.
For all the story-loving writer that I am, I know writing is not a magic cure for the pain and scars of life. It is, however, a real coping mechanism, a positive and productive outlet, a way of seeing and dealing with and finding hope to overcome. Even in the youngest of us, many of whom already know that life doesn’t follow a neat formula, that it seldom follows a clear and sensible series of steps. I often think about what passes for “writing” in schools; it can’t always be a neat response to a text or a prompt. If we are truly to equip children with tools for life, it begins with a real response to their lives in this world. We owe them, for as long as we have them, a place to feel safe, to be loved, a way of having some control in the face of change, to find their own power despite their powerlessness.To write their own lives, even as life is unfolding.
To have hope on the journey as it takes so many twists and turns.
Time is of the essence; we don’t know for how long or short a time they’ll be in our sphere of influence. Good-byes can come without warning.
And so I quickly gathered the best tools I had at my disposal: pencils, notebooks, a couple of favorite books from my shelf. It was my way of saying Godspeed, child. Write your OWN story. Believe. Attend to your heart. Here’s a piece of mine to carry with you.
Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.
You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will love you, whom you will love next.
—excerpts, Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Outside
in the blaze of summer
the barest hint of change
In the crescendo of cicada song
a whisper of waning
Almost imperceptibly
the shift begins
Inside
climate controlled
time suspended
Isolation
but not desolation
as inevitably, in life,
the shift begins
I walk the hospital floor
thinking that cicadas don’t know
Or do they?
Their song throbs loudest
in the summer sun that remains
This same sun that
casts shadows
where I must walk
also casts unexpected rainbows
at my feet.
lit bits and pieces 