Summer is the perfect season for spontaneity and there is no better place than Vermont to make spur of the minute side ventures happen. This week alone I’ve grilled (okay eaten but fully watched the grilling) corn and chicken, swam across the local lake multiple times, picked 
6 more quarts of strawberries for jam, biked along my favorite recreation path with the ‘bitchin babes’, luncheoned with my dearest (and recently returned) snow-birds who form 1/2 of my writers’ group, enjoyed two outdoor concerts, first a full orchestra high up on the von Trapps’ mountain with fireworks popping during the overture, then dinner listening to my friends’ blues band while overlooking Lake Champlain, started stacking wood for the winter (well, not exactly fun, but having it delivered this week was pure luck!); I braved a plunge into the frigid river waterfall, ate ice cream more than once, drank plenty of pink wine (my new obsession this summer, although I do believe most grown-ups call it rosé) watched (from my bed) the sunrise and (from my deck) the sunset and thoroughly enjoyed every brilliant and warm second in between, and yet, haven’t sat down to write a word! I did manage to glance back through my blog, and found an apropos summer post from 2012. I truly hope you enjoy this golden oldie reposted below. Afterwards, please go outside and enjoy SUMMER too! xxoo
Category Archives: Life
“look up and out” #again
I’ve just returned from scoring AP English Literature exams, 1400 of them to be exact, and I will not pretend to have much of a brain left to blog. But besides that reality, this post, which I wrote a few years ago, speaks of my experience then, and is echoed just as vividly now. There are multiple worlds that collide while I am in Louisville: the privileged AP students whose essays I am reading and the homeless camping about the city. I have no answers to our national questions of poverty and race and inequality, only these brief personal reflections, only this re-post from 2012 in which to decipher my myriad of emotions. I thank you old-time Nine Cent Girl fans for re-reading. I hope to be back on solid ground next week.
Graduation Day #again
First published in June of 2011. True then. True now; and I hope you think worth a re-read too!! 
As a teacher of high school seniors, come June, I am reminded daily of the almost–here graduation-day swiftly moving toward us. There is no them and me or me and them at this point, for we have all been riding on this roller-coaster of great expectations and harsh realities for an entire school year together. All over the country 18 year olds are experiencing this free-falling sensation and I for one think it is a feeling worth catching on to, but I did not start out with this appreciation. No, I most certainly did not, in fact, I did my best to stay uninfected with what I, as well as most adults, labeled senior-itis.
