“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.

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On This New Day

This morning I woke feeling a bit off kilter. After eight days of being in a very intensive and regimented program of scoring AP English Literature essays, I suddenly had six undefined hours ahead of me before I needed to be at the airport, and my morning felt oddly stiff, like donning a new pair of shoes. I attempted to lay in bed but dawn called me out and up and lead me to wander beside the Ohio River, which snakes along the backside of Louisville, Kentucky.

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