perseverance

Green comfort

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Written 7/9/2024

Today I type my thoughts while sitting by the green-gray Atlantic. Ancient undulations roll on and on like Time itself, cascading into new foam as brief and bright as this new morning.

The older I become (this is the last year of my fifties) the more I contemplate the brevity of things. Suddenly—it seems—the kids are grown with lives of their own. The granddaughters are older and smarter every day. Micah, age two-and-three-quarters, carries on a conversation like an adult. She knows what “be brave” means. She will need that attribute in life more than she can know.

I have.

My husband walks out into the waters for a moment. He’s not much of a beachgoer anymore, after all his medical crises in recent years. He’s here because I want to be. Because I need a little salt, a little sun, probably a lot of Vitamin D, and the comfort of this vast continuum. We loved the beach when we were young. Almost thirty-nine years into the marriage, the ocean is personal metaphor, a living promise, ceaseless.

Ever how grounded I may be in my faith, I am not immune to lapses. Today, as I logged on to write this post, WordPress offered a prompt:

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

And in my email inbox, a devotion from Our Daily Verse on increasing perseverance.

For me, the key to increasing comfort and perseverance in daily life begins with remembering that God is still God. No matter what. Not merely the limb on which I perch when I’m tired and despairing, but the whole of existence. The true eternal. Generations of our whole human history rise and fall like the ocean waves, and God holds it all.

The sun grows hot. My husband can’t take it for long, and, truth be told, neither can I. Our morning by the sea is brief. We must seek a respite. Somewhere shadowy and green.

I can’t help thinking of forgiveness as a green thing…well-watered with tears, surely, but under its lush canopy, comfort. Rest. Freedom. Peace. As we prepare to leave the shore, my husband and I watch parasailors. How peaceful it must be, so high above it all. I wonder what they hear up there. Here on the ground I hear the ocean’s roar, a strain of cicadas in the scrubby brush, and a baby laughing nearby, playing in the sand.

Some of my favorite sounds on Earth.

Along with the house finch singing as soon as we arrived at the beach this morning. I heard it as soon as I opened the car door. Instantly recognizable. It’s the beautiful song I hear on my front porch every spring and summer. In itself, the sound of perseverance. Of home. It seems to follow me everywhere I go. “Hello, Finch,” I called back to him, perched there in his crape myrtle tree, his little head and breast as red as sunset.

At a recent gathering, my neighbor joked that we’ve reached the time of life in which we just want to watch birds.

There’s comfort in it.

Yesterday while walking through the beach community I saw a green heron. I don’t recall ever having seen one before. A week ago I responded to a fellow blogger, wishing I could have seen the green heron she wrote of, so lyrically.

And one came to me.

The heron and I watched each other for a long awed moment, before she (?) flew to the other side of the pond and I walked on, to let her be.

I contemplate the symbolism of the green heron.

From a biblical perspective, my first go-to, it’s not great. Herons are “unclean” per the Law, i.e., not suitable for consumption, although one resource states that “The very poor of our western and southeastern coast states eat them”(in 1915, that is to say, per the ISB Encyclopedia, written just before the birds were protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act). I wasn’t expecting this, the act or the desperation. It’s been illegal to hunt and kill herons for over a hundred years. Furthermore, the green heron is known to be an irritable, angry bird.

Sounds like some people l know. I don’t want to be one of them.

There are a number of other spiritual meanings associated with the green heron, among them humility, patience, adaptability, wisdom, the ability to focus intently (heaven knows I need this; I used to be better at it than I am now)… and perseverance.

What it really comes down to, however, is how I felt when I encountered this bird. I’d desired to see it, and it came. We were maybe ten feet apart. The heron fixed its bright golden eye intently on me and I was awed. Encouraged. Curious.

It didn’t say anything but I imagine if we spoke the same language, it might have said Be watchful. Be brave. You will persevere. What you need will be provided.

All this in a space of a held breath, in a flutter of green wings, beside the still waters…

I believe. I walk lighter, a wordless green song in my heart.

My green heron

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

‘Bad things are going to happen’ poem

/ Fran Haley / 30 Comments

On the last day of the March Open Write at Ethical ELA, host Shelly Martin-Young invited participants to write a poem modeled after “Relax” by Ellen Bass. Shelley said: “Think about all of the things that are happening in your life right now, good or bad. Make a list and write your ‘relax’ poem. When my students write their Relax poems, I have them start with Ellen’s first line: Bad things are going to happen. So start there and just write. Maybe by the end of the poem, you will be able to relax, let it go, and taste the sweet fruit.”

So I took the first line, and wrote…

Carrying On

Bad things are going to happen.
Your husband will break the handle
off your favorite coffee mug
(the one with Shakespeare’s signature,
that you’ve had since your freshman year
of college). Your young son will lose
the basketball pendant that belonged
to his grandfather in the 1930s. 
It will never be found. Your car dashboard
will burst into flames midway through
a long trip in the mountains and you will discover 
there’s not enough Dr. Pepper 
in that bottle you’re holding 
to douse them. People will disappoint you
and confuse you with their chameleon loyalties
—“fickle,” your mother will tell you, 
while you are still a child.
And the time will come when you no longer
have a relationship with your mother.
You’ll learn, to your astonishment, that your
father is the family glue and everything will
fall apart when he dies. The baby finches
in the nest on your front door wreath
—so perfect, so wondrous—will also die
without warning. You’ll find all five
with their yellow beaks frozen open to the sky,
their tiny bodies quivering with maggots.
Your husband will be diagnosed with
the beginning of ocular melanoma.
He will sacrifice his left eye in order to stay alive. 
Then, one Sunday afternoon,
he’ll go into cardiac arrest
while driving home from the gym.
He’ll be resuscitated. He’ll endure two surgeries.
When he’s over all that, it will be time for 
his spinal fusion. He will depend on you
more and more…you’ll break your left foot twice
and still keep pace with the days as they unfold…
for the days become years 
and the years will bring you 
two little granddaughters.
This, this will be the richest time
of your entire existence,
as rich as the red on the breast of 
the reddest male finch you’ve ever seen,
singing so beautifully there on your porch
that your heart will be filled to bursting with the sound
of life, carrying on.  

*******

Composed for Day 25 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Q: What to write now?

/ Fran Haley / 19 Comments

WordPress, the content management system for my blog, regularly offers prompts to writers. A way to get the creative juices flowing, you know… and to connect people through sharing their stories.

For, as my fellow Slicers of Life can tell you, stories knit our hearts together like nothing else. Stories are the fabric of our lives, the storehouse of our memories, and one of our most creative endeavors. They are the way we see and shape our world. They shape us. Stories are among humankind’s greatest tools and gifts.

To that end: It occurs to me that a little inspiration might be needed for the Slice of Life Story Challenge. After ten days of writing, some of us may be running low on fuel. Here are a few WordPress prompts, just in case anyone out there can can use them…

  1. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
  2. You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
  3. What’s one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
  4. Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
  5. What big events have taken place in your life over the last year?

Confession: It would be soooo convenient to end this post here and make another to answer my favorite of these questions (i..e, stretching this post into two; one DOES have to be strategic during a challenge), but the teacher-writer in me says You know you have to show, not just tell.

All right, all right.

My favorite from this list is #2: You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

A: I have no idea.

First of all, not sure writing my autobiography is a venture I desire to undertake. A memoir, perhaps…a memoir in verse, even more appealing, but…hmmm. You writers know what our greatest fear is, don’t you: Will anyone really read it? Or care?

Which brings me to the point that this is a secondary concern.

Because…write for you first. Capture the words emerging in your brain like new and fragile butterflies. Jot the images before the rains of time wash them away like chalk from a driveway. Relive your memories; spend time with the people you have loved and lost and will miss all your days…along with the lessons you picked up along the way. Answer the Muse who stands so patiently (exasperatedly?) over you, tugging at your creative human soul where beats your struggling writer-heart. Just because you don’t feel the tug doesn’t mean she’s gone. Oh, she’s there, all right, standing with her arms crossed, tapping her foot.

Enough avoiding the task at hand…how would I start my autobiography?? (I do wish the question was for “memoir,” alas…I’d find it more compelling, even if the world at a large uses the terms interchangeably).

Here I am, stalling, tempted to say Check back tomorrow for the reveal! Truth is, I need to think awhile…

ALL. RIGHT. Here goes…

—Can I please switch questions? Can I answer #3 instead? What’s one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

A: Right now I hate to be asked what the first sentence of my autobiography would be, because I. HAVE. NO. IDEA. Furthermore, I am now asking myself WHY I ever picked it (I suddenly feel like a student trying to write a short essay on an exam after having selected my topic most unwisely).

Sigh.

I set my own foot on this path… so, let me see where it leads (do you hear me, Muse? You gotta take it from here. Please…).

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Well… it’s a start.

*******

Composed for Day 10 of the Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
(keep going, y’all!)

Expectations

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

As a literacy coach and intervention team facilitator, I am tasked with communicating expectations of my administration and the district to my colleagues. It’s a tricky position (correction: these are tricky positions. Plural. Sometimes I feel like Bartholomew Cubbins, wearing 500 hats). At present, my fellow educators are, in the wake of COVID, undergoing state-mandated Science of Reading training while adjusting to new curriculum and new leadership. It all comes with new expectations.

Truth be told, however, many of these expectations aren’t new: Problem-solving as a professional community, finding what we need as educators to give the students what they need. Bridging gaps. Collaborative planning. Collective responsibility. None of these are new; they just feel new if they’ve not been done effectively before…the bottom line being the determination of this is what the kids really need; how do we make it happen?

It’s formidable challenge, in a time where there are many needs, and when educational philosophies, beliefs, and mindsets clash. I recently wrote about endurance (from a spiritual point of view). This new school year follows one of extreme exhaustion. We will not endure without leaning on one another. We will not build our strength in isolation. We will not succeed without stamina. Or vision. Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). Grappling with expectations is, well, expected. Everything, everything, everything rests on one of two beliefs: it can be done or it can’t.

I believe it can.

Yesterday my granddaughter visited. The hummingbird feeder rings I ordered for us had just arrived. Perfect timing. We took them out of the package, washed them, made a tiny batch of sugar water, and filled them. Off to the yard we trotted to stand with our arms resting on the fence near one of my two feeders where a handful of hummingbirds compete for their nectar throughout the day.

You can see for yourself, in the photo, my granddaughter thinking I don’t know about this…yet there’s a layer of hope and fear in her expression: Will the hummingbirds actually come drink from my ring? Will I be scared?

After a while: How long is this going to take?

The secret, my love, is patience and persistence. If it doesn’t work the first time, we will try again, and again. Hummingbirds have come to drink from the rings of other people in other places; they will eventually do so with us. Keep trying. Believe. I will stand with you until it does.

Oh, right.

I started off talking about teaching, didn’t I.

Expression of uncertain expectation. After she left, I went out again when the hummers were more active. A couple of them hovered nearby, considering me and my outstretched, ringed hand (hummingbirds are highly intelligent and curious). If they come to me…they will come to my granddaughter. I will see if can make it happen for her.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life Story Challenge

All in for the kids

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

In the interview
the candidate said
we don’t get credit
for all we’ve endured
on behalf of kids
in these past two years

and apologized
for the sudden tears

every one of which
surfaces from depths
immeasurable
a soul subjected
to intense pressure
somehow withstanding
high temperatures
beyond describing

the weight of the world
in every teardrop
salt-worth far beyond
the rarest diamond

culminating crown
of love resounding
courage rebounding
in five wondrous words:
“I still want to teach”

Eye Don’t Cry. corner of art. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

It’s all about the journey

/ Fran Haley / 4 Comments

Flipping through my planner today, scheduling even more things to be done before school is out in June, I discover this quote…

We go through things we never imagined but it may lead us to places we never dreamed.

For just a fraction, a breath, the brokenness of things diminishes…

I could write of this school year’s hardships on colleagues, with colleagues, on families, and on children most of all…

of COVID still rearing its tiny invisible head in the community…

of young and beautiful creatures that have died…

of incomprehensible suffering and loss…

but I will write instead of lush green moments, the “birdiest” spring I’ve ever known, an abundance of wings and chatter and song each day, so many things I’ve never seen before, like a pair of great blue herons flying low over the road from pond to brush…

my son arriving at home, placing his baby daughter in my arms, her tiny sweet hand reaching to pat my face as she drinks from her bottle…

a newness that is more than seasonal, invoking the eternal like shafts of sunlight in shadowed places…

for just a fraction, a breath, I have a sense of undoing, of forests, animals, people restored, rejoicing, the Earth itself laughing, the whole atmosphere charged with absolution, pure, deep, and complete…a bright glimmering, a pulled curtain quickly falling back into place.

It is enough.

I turn the pages and keep writing on my tomorrows.

Write more

/ Fran Haley / 39 Comments

I started this blog in March of 2016 because I knew I needed to write more. At the time I was leading writing workshop training for elementary teachers and teaching writing lessons across grade levels; I would go on to co-design workshops for teachers as writers. Although I’ve loved the craft all my life, I wasn’t always an active writer; if I was going to encourage others to write, that needed to change. One must walk the walk… I came across the Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life Story Challenge too late that year, but I’ve been participating every year thereafter. I didn’t stop writing with the daily March challenge. I kept going on SOLSC Tuesdays. I found other online groups and wrote with them, too… and I kept going when my district moved away from the writing workshop model and stopped providing opportunities for teacher-writers. I kept on going when life took sharp turns. I kept writing because memories started flowing and I didn’t want to turn them off. I kept writing as a means of choosing hope over despair and because I kept coming across interesting things to try. I began recording ideas and dreams in notebooks, all the time thinking about what I might write next…for there’s so much more to write. So many more stories to tell. I love every minute, even when the writing is hardest. I have learned that just beyond that concrete wall is a garden of plenty, if I can just find the hidden door…

I don’t think I would have kept going if I hadn’t been part of a writing community that uplifts, encourages, and inspires one another.

You are the key.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all at Two Writing Teachers.

Fellow Slicers… don’t quit now.

Write more.

When you need a challenge
write more
When challenges are too much
write more
When you need silence
write more
When silence is too much
write more
When you need to know yourself
write more
When knowing yourself is too much
write more
When you need to remember
write more
When remembering is too much
write more
When your heart is full
write more
When your heart is empty
write more
When you are grateful
write more
for you cannot be too grateful
When you are out of ideas
write more
and more ideas will come
When endings come
write more
and find beginnings

My pencil pouch

*******

Thus concludes the daily Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. Thank you for thirty-one days of joy.

Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month; I’ll write more in VerseLove at Ethical ELA.

The feather

/ Fran Haley / 19 Comments

—on the second anniversary of school shutdowns due to COVID-19—

Bleak days. A long, rain-spattered, windswept season, gray as ashes, as stones, just as hard, cold, and immovable. Day to day to day the green promise of spring seems like a dream barely remembered; naked tree branches twist skyward as if beseeching the heavens for renewal…

We go through the motions, automatons numbed by a pandemic not quite past and the ripple effect of unprovoked war on the world stage, as if we’ve somehow fallen through a wormhole to eight decades ago… what year IS this?

I am tired, my colleagues at school tell one another. So tired. Some don’t know if they’re coming back next year. Some don’t know if they’re going to stay in education at all. Our principal is leaving in four weeks.

The children have seemed shell-shocked most of this year. Maybe I seem the same way to them, especially now that masks are optional and I find myself not recognizing some of them; I’ve never seen them without masks before. I don’t know their faces below their eyes.

As I walked the hallways last week, I had a sense of dragging myself over a finish line, except that there is no finish line. Not now, not yet…

But even in the bleakest, rain-spattered, windswept season, when gray goes grayer still, bits of brightness are always swirling. Maybe as tiny as a feather, a soft semiplume shed from a creature with the gift of flight. It might appear to be half one thing and half another… it might have the appearance of dark, wispy, wayward hair as well as a tapered tip dipped in fiery red, altogether like an artist’s brush with which we might, we just might, begin to dispel despair by painting our moments as we will…

So much symbolism in a feather. In the bird that releases it.

It is said that when cardinals appear, angels are near.

I don’t know about that.

I just know a cardinal feather is a symbol of life, hope, and restoration. And courage. And love. And sacrifice…

Falling from the grayest sky
Ethereal, riding the wind
Alluding to nearness of angels
Tiny trace of a nearby cardinal that
Has lost a bit of his insulation
Ephemeral, perhaps, to him
Restorative tincture, to me

Semiplume cardinal feather photographed by my friend,
E. Johnson, 3/11/2022.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.

Lost and found

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

It’s a delicate rose-gold chain with crystal bezels. I don’t know its value, but my oldest son gave it to me some years ago, so to me it is priceless. I wear it every day on my right arm where it frequently catches the light and reminds me of him.

The last thing I do whenever I leave the house is pull it out from under my sleeve (if I am wearing long sleeves or a coat, and as temperatures were in the thirties this morning, I was wearing both).

When I reached for it today, the bracelet wasn’t there.

I had a busy morning ahead; I couldn’t stop to look for it.

I had to carry on without it.

In my mind, I retraced steps. I would look for it when I got home.

And so I did.

Wasn’t in the bed (I’d made it, surely I would have seen the bracelet if it was lying there).

Wasn’t on the floor, not anywhere that I could see. I used my phone flashlight so the bracelet would shine in the light…

I checked my closet, checked the sleeve of my pajamas and my warm red robe.

Not there.

Even checked my husband’s car; we went out for Mexican last night.

No.

“Do you think you lost it at the restaurant?” queried my husband.

“No, I didn’t even take my coat off and the sleeves are fastened close at the wrists. I don’t think it could have fallen out.”

It’s just a little bracelet but it’s irreplaceable.

My boy gave it to me.

Retracing, retracing…

I am a pretty good finder of things. I can usually retrace enough or recall what I was doing well enough to locate a lost thing. I ask myself: What makes sense?

Back to the closet.

It made sense that the bracelet might have come off when I changed out of my robe and pajamas, which I left folded on top of a storage box in there. I had already checked, but…it’s what made the most sense.

Shined my flashlight (again) on the closet floor.

Shook out the pjs.

No.

Shook the fuzzy red robe, ran my hand through the sleeve.

No.

Shined my flashlight on top of the storage box…

A glint of rose-gold, there in a crevice.

—Found.

It’s safely back on my arm now.

So, I haven’t always been able to find a lost thing. Speaking of my boy, he lost a precious item when he was small. It’s a silver basketball pendant that belonged to his grandfather, who played the game in high school. His name is etched onto the pendant along with the year: 1935. My husband was wearing it on a silver chain when we first met. He explained that it belonged to his dad, who died when he was twelve. He said: “If I ever have a son, I am going to name him after my father.” And so, a few years later, our boy was born. He was named for my husband’s father. And he was given the basketball pendant on a silver chain when he was too young, really, to be mindful of it. One day it disappeared. We retraced our steps, hundreds of times, over the days, weeks, months. We have moved a couple of times since then. The pendant has never resurfaced. It’s silly, perhaps, to mourn for a thing, but such a loss is more than material; it’s for the history and person and love attached to it…I prayed many times that the little old basketball pendant from 1935, lost in the 1990s, might still find its way back to us someday.

It hasn’t yet.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t…

Anniversary of twelves

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

On the twelfth day of December, back in the Great Depression, my grandparents were married. My father was born the following October in a tenant farmhouse.

That’s my grandmother’s wedding band in the photo. It’s not the one she received on her wedding day. That ring was thin; it wore “clean through,” Grandma said. Broke in half due to overuse, in the days when washing machines had wringers, in an era of canning and preserving, in the time of sharecropping cotton and looping tobacco.

This is Grandma’s replacement ring. She had her initials and Granddaddy’s engraved inside, along with their wedding date. A wide gold band, made to last.

It is my ring now. I wear it every day.

Often thinking of December 12th.

For it’s not the only anniversary.

Almost thirty years after my grandparents married, their youngest daughter got married. On the same day.

She was eighteen. A senior in high school.

Her husband, my uncle, was going to Vietnam.

I went to that wedding. In utero. I wasn’t born for another five months. My presence was obvious; my mother couldn’t fit into the dress she planned to wear. She had to rush out and buy a new one that day.

My young aunt mailed black-and-white baby pictures of me to my uncle on his tours of duty.

He brought these pictures back home with him.

Fast forward three decades…

On December 12th, exactly sixty years to the day of my grandparents’ wedding, my husband and I learn that we will have another child.

A second son. Our last child.

My grandparents lived to see him and know him. To tell him they loved him, like they always told me.

It is a day of remembrance for me, December 12th. A deep and quiet knowing, a dark-blue glittering gem that I carry in myself in the middle of the holiday season. Meaningful. Valuable. Priceless.

I think of the long-ago Decembers. Family gatherings, celebrations. Layers of blessing. A blanket unfolding again and again to encompass the next generation.

I am a grandparent now; the mantle is passed.

It is one comprised of faith. Of courage and commitment. In it lies the story of persevering against unknowable odds. The Depression. Vietnam. In it I find strength for living now. I know that what keeps us pressing on is having someone to press on for.

Numerologists might wax eloquent on the significance of the number twelve, in all its powerful associations. We mark our time by twelves on the clock, by months in the year…there are ancient connotations such as twelve Olympians, twelve disciples, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve of days of Christmas… twelves go on and on. Twelve is considered the number of perfection, cosmic order, completion. Just now I recall that our second son was born in our twelfth year of marriage. I am not a numerologist, only a poet contemplating patterns. Not a mathematician, just a wonderer. A believer. Pythagoras is said to have said: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

I sense a geometry in dates and a musicality to years…a song of life and the living of it. For me, this is the lesson of 12/12. There’s something of eternity in it.

Which makes perfect sense, if twelve is God’s number.

The song is love.

*******

Many thanks to Two Writing Teachers and the Slice of Life Story Challenge community.
And to readers…you’re all part of the story and the song.