The return to school is a steep climb, but thankfully is one that I have learned to traverse with more surety through the years. Still, the ascent is formative. The piles of novels an English teacher needs to have at her disposal is a big one, and in most cases, there are often several piles due to teaching several courses. Most are, of course, old favorites by this point in my career, but I read them again. Rereading, I love how lines hit me anew. How different images stand for something I just lived through. How the makeup of the class veers into a whole new vein of thought than previously.

Books were very important to my father, and I was reminded of that this week when my brother sent me a list of titles my father recommended to him. I recalled most of the list he handed me. Anything by Jane Austen, he wrote. Both Emily and Charlotte Bronte he insisted. Everything Dickens. He adored George Eliot and reminded me that was a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans. You must read the Russians, start with Tolstoy. And yes, of course Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He included Sigrid Undset’s epic work Kristin Lavransdatter. I read everything while pregnant and nursing, which lasted seemingly for a decade. These days I nudge my students up the same laborious hill of classics, offering historic context with all the excitement I can muster. Making readers these days is more formidable than summiting Everest but perhaps equally rewarding to those who make it there.

I am grateful to live surrounded by easy access to water; rivers follow the old town roadways and cut though our state with purpose, while lakes languish for all to enjoy. I have reveled in the high water levels and warmth of every lake in my vicinity.  The swimming couldn’t be better, and trust me, it does its job of cleansing the soul once you dive in. Swimming out into the middle and floating releases all the heavy stuff.

Of course there is also fabulous biking in September, and I have taken full advantage of that. It is always a treat to be rolling along a recreation path, watching those little ones learning to steady two wheels or pedaling past happy strollers or falling in line with biking folks. If you can’t smile and show generosity on these magnificent and free spaces, well, I don’t know what to say. Of course it would be great if people understood to stay right, pass left, but whatever, some people are just awed by nature, as one woman reminded me as I was trying to pass her and her three golden retrievers, “Sorry, I was in La La Land!” Me too lady, I assured her. Me too.