I really love my job, and nothing could have proven it faster than taking it away from me. Driving up the lamp-post lined Copley Hill to the hundred year old brick building with a hummingbird mural and entering to walk the creaky wood floors to my classroom, the same one I have stood in surrounded by fabulous individuals for over two decades, was my day to day. I miss unlocking that door, greeting the quiet few who always arrive early. Now I get ready for class at our dining room table in the one large space that is kitchen, dining, and living room combined, with windows facing all four directions. Notebook to scribble thoughts for the day, laptop open to a dozen tabs, hot black tea at my elbow, I’m slowly working out how to engage for 45 minutes via a fuzzy and often interrupted google meet twice weekly with my students. Like everyone I know in the school system, I am nonstop problem-solving, whether with curriculum shifts, individual student conferences, talking to para-educators and special educators or with concerned parents. By 4:00 most days I’m intellectually challenged and emotionally drained. But by 4:00 what I’m mostly aware of is how much I miss my students. Miss that class room life. Not every second of it, but most every second with them and all their hope. All their blue sky action.

It snowed a few times this April. Those days seemed particularly oppressive. A fierce northern wind blowing into every crack of our old post & beam farmhouse. But even on those days, one late afternoon, the sun broke straight into me. I let it take me somewhere warm, and sunny, with an ocean pounding along the shore line. Like a spectacular summer night when you head up Ashland Ave. just after the sunset all sandy and salty and there is an outdoor shower waiting for you. The music got turned up, shades on, lips painted, and we danced. We forgot. For a moment. And then remembered something essential swirling deep in our DNA. There is always a moment, this one, that will take you anywhere you are willing to go. Here and now we have to take a breath, and let go, and trust life will resurface. My students would remind me of this. They would say take a breath. They would show me trust.

Thankfully even as we shelter in our own domains we have music to help us celebrate the sun rises and sun sets, music to blast away the clouds and shout us back into jet-setting living and laughing straight into the dawn with all those dear besties…

The sun is shining
Melting the clouds away
Got me some Blue Sky Action
I’m breathing today

Above & Beyond