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. 
Tag Archives: Dance
Colliding into Spring
There are starts and stops at every transition. Like when Winter is slowly colliding into a Spring that turns frozen again. We, in the quiet Northeast, are used to such chaos from our skies. One day we run about in tees and another it’s back into the parka. There is a steady plodding onwards, and general acceptance of what must be will be. Perhaps that is why Vermonters are all cool with so many personal differences through the decades. And perhaps this is why so many of us are sitting tight while COVID19 runs its course. We know how to stay active through long months of difficult weather conditions right inside our own space, plus we got an upward vision that allows us to dream of what is almost here.
Dance on this December Night
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Nine Cent Girl 