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.
Tag Archives: Photography
Pink Perfection
“Today” by Billy Collins [the most popular poet in America] sums up this blessed and recently arrived Spring far better than I could craft. So I will borrow his verse for this week’s post. 
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
running with a coach
I have been 
running for decades, although the task has never been particularly easy nor have I been very fast, so I thought it time to learn about this sport I hope to continue for yet another decade. With this in mind, last April, on Fool’s Day, I began a ten week running clinic. I really didn’t know what to expect other than what was offered in the short blurb in our weekly paper: meet every Wednesday evening, 2 hour running time coupled with short lectures, gather at the town recreational path, and most importantly, all levels are welcome. After 5 weeks, I’m thrilled I signed up for what I have gained in such a short time is far more than I could have anticipated. Our very first class, shockingly, still met in frigid weather, 26 degrees on the thermometer. Ten women arrived, bundled in hats and gloves, and wearing multiple layers. Our coach arrived in a full down-parker. But what he told us on that night was to first and foremost keep running fun, and his weekly message has kept that theme at its very core. Then we learned how to run hills because this is Vermont after all.
Nine Cent Girl 