Berlin on Berlin Street

So already, just to make it clear: I'm talking about Berlin, New York, not Berlin, Germany. And I'm talking about Berlin Street in Quincy, Massachusetts--the Berlin Street that runs behind my building and onto which I look from every window of my condo. Why is it important for you to know this? Because in the era of the COVID-19, life on Berlin Street in my densely populated, industrial-turned-residential Quincy neighborhood has become so much like life in rural, off-the-beaten-track Berlin, New York. Especially when Scott and I have been there long enough for the novelty of being away from Quincy to wear off, and the routine of being in Berlin to establish itself.

So just what is the routine of being in Berlin? 

If/when we do leave the cabin--to hike or walk somewhere, to pick up some groceries or visit the hardware store, to fill our water bottles and haul them down to the cabin (we don't have running water)--we do it in the morning. 

Generally, in the afternoon, we're "around": I read, write, walk around and take some photos, spend some time prepping food for dinner; Scott reads, paints, draws, works somewhere on the property doing something that needs to be done--you can see him here building our most recent temporary bridge. Soon after we listen to the evening news, specifically the regional weather forecast, I cook dinner. 

We eat dinner outside as the sun sets over the trees at the far end of the field. Sometimes we have company: the deer that wander into the field at its far edge and stand looking at us while we sit looking at them. We don't stay up much past dinner, and we sleep a lot generally.

Sounds pretty idyllic, I know, save for carrying those gallon water jugs--I manage two at a time, Scott manages four--the quarter mile from the car to the cabin. But there's another aspect of Berlin life that makes it like Berlin Street life: there's an ongoing concern with disease in both places.

Scott wandering down to the flume

Observe in the adjacent photo that Scott's wearing a long-sleeved white shirt on an August afternoon (all that goldenrod!). We wear light-colored clothing spring, summer, and fall, long-sleeved if possible, so we can spot ticks on our clothing before they have a chance to burrow into our skin.  

The deer we enjoy seeing at dinnertime walk the same paths and trails that we walk; and when there are deer, there are deer ticks. That's why we tuck our long pants into our socks even on the hottest days and oh so romantically look for ticks on each other's bodies before lights out. It didn't used to be this way, but we've adjusted to these practices in hopes of not contracting Lyme Disease.

I am beginning to think that the novelty of coronavirus stay-at-home exile has begun to wear off for many of us. I suspect this is true for unemployed or retired city-dwellers inhabiting small spaces who are close to having finished all the home improvement projects they envisioned completing while confined to home. It's probably also true, but in an entirely different way, for teachers up to their ears in the challenges and frustrating limitations of teaching online. Working from home in any kind in any way, I imagine, is no doubt better than not working at all; but the challenge of separating work from not work, difficult for anyone who does both in the same place, can get old fast.

Those whose COVID-19 routine to date has been to awake to the challenge of beginning and/or keeping at a project until it could be checked off as "done" may be at that moment when they need something else to do. Their projects completed, they might embrace this moment as the opportunity to develop or simply commit to those habits that reflect what they really want to do or be, what they know energizes and expresses them, what they're hoping to make happen when coronavirus is in the rear view mirror, or at least adequately tamed. At least that's been my approach.

I've been writing a lot since the coronavirus siege began, listening to CDs I'd forgotten I owned, walking a lot more, too--probably because I've stopped going to rehearsals, stopped meeting friends almost anywhere (no Grafton Street charges on my credit card), and stopped visiting my parents as often and for as long as has been my habit (our through-their-windows visits don't last nearly as long as our visits did before visitors were prohibited by their senior living community). I have to commend my fellow Quincy residents for their generally excellent adherence to social distancing guidelines, which makes walking near the beach and the marshes such a safe, cheering alternative to being home.

I've been reading more, too. I find reading to be the hardest thing to do when I live in a world of constant interruption (for which I'm much to blame since I much too readily turn my attention to interruptions--the way I just went to answer the phone while I as typing the word "interruptions"). Just this morning, I didn't get up from the living room sofa until I'd read the entire newspaper. And recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer has been insisting on being read.

So what's going on here? Is this really just about fewer interruptions? Or is it about the permission I'm giving myself to stay seated for an extended period of time--which I'm not apt to do, unless I'm writing? Or is it really that this time of enforced exile has created space and time that would normally be sliced into errands and obligations, or at least perceived obligations? 

The kind of involvement I'm experiencing with The Water Dancer is not an unusual experience for me when I'm in Berlin (or, I must say, when I'm on the subway, another place I avoid in the time of coronavirus; hmmm . . . ): some magazine, some novel, some collection of poetry, some extended piece of nonfiction commands my full attention until I've read it all the way through, and maybe even read it again. Robyn Schiff's A Woman of Property sat on my Quincy bookshelf for months, its excellent book reviews frequently recommending it. I even started it a few times. But not until I began reading it again in Berlin did I feel not only that I couldn't put it down, but that I had to read it again as soon as possible. And that didn't mean I couldn't pause from it to do the various tasks and chores that are part of cabin living. In Berlin, it all fits rather than competes.

Funny, though, to be talking about A Woman of Property. I haven't read the book for a while, but I do have really strong memories of how much it was a book about fear--but also a book about faith. I recall a poem in which a young mother, or perhaps a mother-to-be, has discovered yet another way a piece of nursery furniture could be potentially dangerous to her child. (I just looked for the book on my shelf, but can't find it, which leads me to believe it may be on the shelf in Berlin, NY). Even now, I remember being caught up in the poem: it was sad, it was funny--the mind could create such fear, as if there wasn't enough to fear without the mind's machinations. It's always interesting how we choose to spend our energies, though that word "choose" might not apply in all situations. I suspect it applies more than we might like it to, though.

Everyone's Home

In a time when stories of migration so often relate the experience of being exiled from home, not exiled to home, we're forced to confront what home means to each of us. Home for many of us used to be the place we returned after a day of being out, about, and among, not the place anyone could expect to find us at any time. Now all of us are more apt to have to explain why we didn't "pick up" or reply, since we were probably "there" and probably could have.

Generally, some part of me feels most at home on Berlin Street, another part of me in Berlin. Right now, however, my two homes seem to have converged in terms of the similar ways they permit me to shape my days. My routines are working for now.

Meanwhile, beyond our front doors, there's much to take seriously in terms of how we act and what we do to protect ourselves. Good routines, whether we're at home or out in the world, are all we have to see us through right now. Good routines . . . and hope and prayer. Luck, too.

Online and Personal: First Thoughts About Home-Alone Learning During Pandemic

So already, I loved Shonda Rhimes' tweet about homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic: I love anything that shows respect for teachers and the challenging work they do all the time, usually successfully. 

But truthfully, I think the challenges Rhimes experienced have little to do with her not being a teacher by profession. In a moment when a whole nation is on edge, when teachers and students are both fearful, and when students can sense that the adults around them are also fearful, even if they are calm, it's hard for students and teachers alike to get focused and stay focused on learning--well, at least on some kinds of learning.

So what kinds of learning can and should happen in a moment like this one? And what's working in our favor in March 2020 as we set out to support our students academically and emotionally during a moment that's "new" for everyone? And yes, I said emotionally: if we're not thinking emotionally, we might as well give it up now, in my opinion. 

[And no, this is not going to be a blog post about the abundant socioeconomic inequities that are a very real impediment to many children's being able to take learning advantage of this current bizarre educational moment--but I'm very glad any number of other people are writing about that very important problem. And while we're at it, an additional warning: I was a high school English teacher before I retired in 2014, so the students I'm foremost imagining as I write this are secondary school students, though I've been really curious about the way teachers of younger students are handling all of this.]

Here's what's in our favor, especially in places where schools and kids' homes provide access to online environments:

Greening Willow Near the Princess Eve Salt Marsh

• First of all, it's springtime. That means that students know one another, since they've been in class together since the beginning of either the school year or the semester. This was true right after the Boston Marathon bombings, which also disrupted the emotional equilibrium of both students and teachers, at least where I worked. It was not true after 9/11, which occurred when the school year was very young and students were only beginning to get to know their teachers and fellow students. The bottom line is this: when students already know one another through face-to-face interactions, it's much easier to create an online learning environment that is safe enough for them to take the intellectual and emotional risks on which learning depends.


• Second of all, many classrooms that are going online completely have already been operating as blended classrooms--classrooms in which at least some learning and learning resources are respectively orchestrated and shared online. That means that given the time of year, teachers and students already know how to work in these online environments. Given that they've already had opportunities to use the "required" online tools, students are not worried about how to submit work either for pre-final-assessment feedback or for final assessment. And they don't need more to worry about right now!

So what is it that students do need right now? First, I think they need to maintain a sense of connection to one another. They need to know how one another is doing, if they are all okay or getting better in relation to coronavirus, what each of them is going through as a member of a family and part of a neighborhood. I know that chances are high students will communicate some of this without its being part of school, but I still think it's important for this kind of communication to have its place in the virtual classroom, where teachers can look in on it.

Second, they need opportunities to talk about what they're hearing, seeing, experiencing, wondering about, feeling: in other words, there needs to be room for the pandemic online. For many years, classrooms have been places where students have come to vet the information they've gotten from here, there, or anywhere.That needs to continue, and it represents a skill and questioning disposition that schools are always trying to cultivate in students anyway.

New Hampshire Vernal Pool

Third, they need to keep their established learning routines in place: some students might be in the habit of sharing a current event story weekly, of posting data about an ongoing science investigation regularly (since going outside still is okay under the right conditions, heading out to the backyard or a nearby vernal pool* could still happen), of posting a review of an outside reading book monthly, of sharing every two weeks what's happening in their "assigned country" as relates to a global issue the whole class is studying. And also of responding to others' online posts related to all of these. Good habits are reassuring, normalizing things during moments that unsettle us collectively.

So what about other academic learning, specifically whole-class curricular learning? I believe that this is not the best time for introducing all kinds of "new conceptual content," not the time to be committed foremost to teaching units that were planned last August for this March: in my experience, new conceptual content, especially for young people who are developing their capacities to ask questions and capture their own and others' answers to them--in other words, young people who are still much in the process of learning to negotiate learning with themselves and with others, and who may have special learning needs in addition--is best taught when there can be face-to-face interactions around it. Some schools and classroom groups may have the capacity to forge ahead online as if COVID-19 isn't shaping our lives, but most cannot. And so be it. Adherence to pacing guides and curricular plans just isn't the most important thing right now.

So what could, and perhaps should, school be about right now if "new stuff" is too hard learn and teach outside of the classroom? I think this is a real moment for helping students to retain what they've learned this school year to date. This could be done by

• first, reminding them, or helping them to remember, what they've experienced in the classroom and created/done during the past year/semester: the teacher could lay out an online timeline of the learning events, or better yet, the students could create the course timeline and plot the learning events on it;

• second, getting them to look at the work they've done--the projects, the homework, any online or folder/binder-housed portfolios--and supporting them to reflect on what they think they've learned--and what makes them think they've learned it (saying "I got a good grade" won't cut it). Incidentally, the learning that students identify can and should relate to both skills and content: they should be encouraged to say what they can now "do better" and to say what they now understand more deeply, or understand now that they misunderstood or only partially understood before. 

• and third, asking them what parts of the learning they've identified that they most value-- 

• as learners generally, 
• as learners of a particular subject matter, and 
• as human beings with individual interests and goals

--and why. It's also fine for them to identify learning areas where they feel they still have learning to do: teachers can then direct them to online places** that can help them fill in their learning gaps or make their tentative learning more certain, and therefore more useful to them.

Reflection on learning always involves some explaining, some describing, and some story-telling. Therefore, it's essential that teachers provide an array of questions from among which students can choose to help them express their most authentic, thoughtful reflections on their personal learning journeys. Some variation of the Project Zero "I used to think . . .; now I think . . ." thinking routine*** is always a good idea:

• I used to think  . . .; now I understand that . . .; 
• I used to wonder . . .; now I know . . .;
• I used to think I was/wasn't good at . . .; now I feel that  . . . because . . .;
• I used to think I was good at . . .; now I understand . . .;
• I used to think . . .; now I want . . .;
• I used to think I couldn't  . . .; now I think . . ..

"Spring Reflections"****

All of these thinking routine modifications indicate a before-and-after mindset in order to help students recognize their progress. It's a wonderful thing to empower students to say with authority what they think they have learned, especially when they're basing their judgments on the evidence provided by their own work and their knowledge of themselves. It's amazing how often students, when encouraged to reflect, take the opportunity to describe changes in not only their skills and knowledge, but their attitudes toward learning and even their understanding of how learning happens for them personally. One of the biggest shifts I've often had students identify was in their appreciation of the benefits of learning with others: through conversations; through the need to negotiate a common purpose or action as part of a group project.  

The good news is that online spaces are really good places for showing student work and for posting excerpts from and reflections about that work. Whether students post the actual work or photographs of it, they and other students can see what exactly they're talking about in their reflections.

There's so much literature about how much student learning is lost over summer vacation. There's a real chance that the COVID-19 closure of schools--who knows how long it will last--could create a hiatus in learning regardless of all the well-meaning steps teachers and schools are taking to make learning continue during pandemic. 

But I have very serious questions about academic content can be learned deeply and flexibly during a time of so much stress. Better our students should be given the chance to reflect back over the school and develop a thoughtful snapshot of themselves and their learning at this very moment. If they can see that they've learned, know what they've learned, celebrate what they've learned, understand how they've grown, and somehow capture what they've learned in a form that they can examine at a later date--in other words, if they can make their learning visible**** so that they can look at it later and use it to reorient themselves and then relaunch their learning in schools on the basis of it--that would be a very hopeful and very useful thing. 

Reggio Emilia's Teatro Municipale*****

"Making Learning Visible" isn't my phrase; it's the name of a Project Zero project that I was part of as a teacher-researcher for many years--and that had its beginnings in the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. As the coronavirus has ravaged Italy, I've thought a lot about Reggio Emilia. I've wondered about the welfare of the students and teachers, and about the way all of the schools have been  dealing with the virus-imposed interruption of schooling. 

Though I can't know for sure, I've felt certain that those who embrace the values and best practices of the preschools have been doing everything they could not to separate the intellectual and curricular from the social-emotional or the civic. And we would be advised not to do so either. Let's give our students the chance to be who they are--and see who they are--in this moment of novel uncertainty. Let's impress upon them that just because they've lost time in school buildings doesn't mean they've stopped learning, or that they will lose learning. Above all, let's provide them with learning experiences that communicate our certainty that there will be a post-COVID-19 future and that they'll be ready for it as students and human beings.

* https://extension.unh.edu/resource/vernal-pools 
** There are great online resources for kids struggling to use certain marks of punctuation correctly--ones that offer online quizzes that explain to students their right and wrong answers.
*** https://smartprimaryed.com/2016/03/06/ideas-visible-thinking-thinking-routines-part-2/ 
**** One of several "Spring Reflections" photographs on "The Dancing Donkey" blog: http://thedancingdonkey.blogspot.com/2015/04/spring-reflections.html
***** Paolo Picciati / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teatro_municipale_notturno_reggio_emilia.JPG 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkdSXs9dng

Mask of the Red Breath

So already, I've been washing my hands like crazy and questioning my every cough and sneeze since 2020 began. It hasn't been all about coronavirus for me, though: in fact, I don't think I heard the word "coronavirus" until mid-January.  

It began because my dad was diagnosed with RSV (respiratory syncitial virus) on New Year's Day. This virus is especially dangerous for babies and elderly persons, and my younger sister and I had to be very strategic about how and when we visited our mother while my dad was sick. In fact, what we ended up doing, if we couldn't visit my mother before visiting my dad, was to split the visiting responsibilities: one of us would visit my mother, and one of us would visit my father on any given day.

My dad recovered fully from RSV and the viral pneumonia that accompanied it, so I was able to head off to Maine the last week of January for my planned writing retreat. My first night in Maine, I was treated to a great dinner in Bangor by an old high school friend and his wife; the headmaster of a Bangor high school that has many international students, he'd just returned from a trip to China and he'd tested negative for coronavirus as part of his traveling home. I hoped for the sake of all three of us that we could trust his test results: I wanted to trust the national governments of China and the USA when it came to COVID-19, but I wasn't sure I could.

I kept my back-burner worries to myself, and decided that for the next fourteen days, I'd tell my parents I was fighting a cold and keep my distance from them. Luckily, my friend's good test results proved to be true. 

By then, my constant handwashing was an ingrained habit--and one I decided to keep up since it was Chinese New Year season, a multi-week season of family-visiting for Chinese people, who make up a significant part of Quincy's population.* My own Quincy neighborhood, the section of Wollaston that borders North Quincy, is home to many Chinese people, and also many elderly people. Face masks have never been an uncommon sight in my neighborhood. But when I observed that so many more of my Chinese neighbors were wearing face masks than was usually the case--I surmised they were protecting themselves from anyone who had recently returned from visiting family in China--I decided to keep playing it very safe. I didn't start wearing a face mask (and I still haven't), but I kept watching to see if I'd see fewer or more masks as time went on.

But face masks weren't the only evidence I had that things weren't normal. Every place I turned, I saw more proof** that my Chinese neighbors were taking no chances. 

First there were articles about the much smaller crowds that participated in Quincy's annual Lunar New Year Festival: less than half the usual number of people attended, and many who did attend wore masks.

Then there was the fact that when I boarded the subway train--something I stopped doing about a month ago--there were significantly fewer Asian people boarding the train or already on it than I generally counted on seeing. 

Finally, when I went to the first concert in the public library's March Sunday afternoon concert series--it featured Korean-American improvisational pianist Eunhye Jeong--there were no Asian people who came to hear her. In other years, Asian families have made up a large part of the audience, especially when the featured performers have been of Asian origin. 

My solution: keep washing my hands. Keep watching what other people were and weren't doing. And also, buy some of Eunhye Jeong's excellent CDs. She's really good!

I have been feeling for my Chinese neighbors as this situation has been unfolding. I'd been reading the articles about struggling restaurants and businesses in Boston's Chinatown, and I suspected that many of my neighbors were already feeling the pinch more locally, despite their being so fastidious and health-conscious: let's face it--no one who runs a business wants to become known as the place that made its customers sick and helped fuel a pandemic.

It also can't be fun to be part of a population that the President's "Chinese virus" comments routinely suggest is "to blame" for America's coronavirus emergency. Anti-Chinese hate crimes are on the increase***, and I hate the idea of people's needing to fear other people as well as coronavirus at this time.

But needing to fear other people is an old American story. I remember how so many of the Cambridge gas stations whose proprietors were of Arab descent began prominently displaying American flags right after 9/11. "We're not terrorists; we're proud Americans," those flags seemed to be trumpeting.  What is this thirst for identifying "enemies of the people," to declare that a subset of "the people" is the "enemy of the people"? It's only a rhetorical question I'm asking, since I know the thirsty ones are doing this deliberately.

With elderly parents, and as a resident of a building that houses 144 different "families," that sits diagonally across the street from a daycare center, and that is 3-minute walk from a subway station, I'm just going to keep my social distance when I have to be out in the world, which I do have to be sometimes. I'm really grateful to my Chinese neighbors for modeling such health-conscious behavior in the face of COVID-19. The world won't end if my husband and I get the virus, survive  it, and manage not to pass it on.

Meanwhile, while I was writing this, I received an email from the Josiah Quincy Orchestra Program. As I flipped through the program's web site, I came across the adjacent photo. One more great reminder about the importance of home practice--in my case, hand-washing. 

Let's face it: washing our hands is better than wringing our hands. But now I'm thinking that carrying a face mask just in case is probably a good idea--so now I have something new to do.

* https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/quincy-ma-population/

** Poon, F. (2020, February 3). The Quincy Lunar New Year festival opened with a dragon dance performance Feb. 2 by the Wah Lum Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy at North Quincy High School. [Photograph found in Sampan, Quincy]. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from https://sampan.org/2020/02/quincy-welcomes-lunar-new-year/ (Originally photographed 2020, February 2)
*** https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/19/trump_anti_chinese_racism_coronavirus_covid19
**** https://www.jqop.org/jqop-online?mc_cid=d39e2e3dd9&mc_eid=69d1f47191

Eden in Lockdown, Senior Style

No Senior Art Exhibit Openings at OC Right Now!

So already, I didn't like the first sentence of my horoscope in today's Boston Globe:  "An elderly family member needs your help more than he or she is saying." Not a good thing to read in the era of coronavirus lockdown!

My parents both live at Orchard Cove, a Hebrew Senior Life facility in Canton. And currently, I can't visit either them: in accordance with the protocols put into place by Hebrew Senior Life and the mandates issued by the governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, there can be no visitors to Orchard Cove right now, except under the most serious of circumstances.

My parents live in two separate sections of Orchard Cove. We were going to celebrate their seventieth wedding anniversary last Sunday afternoon with a family party in the Cove Room, but, of course, that party had to be cancelled.

For the time being, my father can't visit my mother, and I can't visit either of them. How long this will last, and what questions I'll need to answer in order to be admitted when the "No Visitors" ban is lifted or modified, I don't know. But I will say that if I didn't have two nonagenarian parents in my life, I'd be less anxious about contracting coronavirus myself.

Needless to say, with each passing day, it becomes increasingly disconcerting not to be able to visit them, despite the wisdom of the ban. My father understands exactly what's going on. My mother sometimes does. 

As soon as I read my horoscope, I called both of my parents, and then the nurse on my mother's floor, since my mother didn't answer the phone. My dad informed me that one of friends who brings his own favorite kind of dry cereal to breakfast every morning wasn't worried about running out because he has five boxes of it in his room. The nurse on my mother's floor assured me my mother, who was having breakfast in the common dining space on her floor, was fine and usually did understand that everything was different right now--not just her.

So let me say what I'm grateful for at this moment.

• I'm so glad that a few weeks ago, my parents got to meet their first great grandchild--my niece's son. This was such a happy day for all of us--I met him for the first time that day, too. Thankfully this happened before all of us needed to stay home and stay away from Orchard Cove.  

• Since I'm the one who sets up my dad's medication boxes, I'm so glad that I'm always at least three weeks ahead in terms of keeping him stocked up: he has all the meds he needs for up until the middle of April. I'd thought we were preparing for the possibility of a blizzard that might temporarily separate us; not so.

• I'm so glad that the people at Orchard Cove are not only taking such good care of my parents and all the other seniors living there, but also communicating regularly about what they're doing to keep everyone as safe as possible. Thank you, Orchard Cove for keeping the world far away right now. And my parents and I have a constant topic of conversation these days: the latest protocols that have been put into place.

• I'm also so glad that the Orchard Cove staff is doing all they can to keep families connected in meaningful ways, most importantly by facilitating technological face-to-face communication between residents and their near and dear. Seeing people and not just hearing their voices seems to be making all of this separation just a little less intense.

• Finally, I'm so glad that the weather hasn't been an issue for us--although I'm thinking that the people in Tennessee who are still living much in response to early March's tornadoes probably feel otherwise. We've had some Massachusetts mid-Marches that were remarkable for their late-winter blizzards, or their gale-force winds and flooding rains--fallen power lines and underwater roadways. But not this year: God has been good!

Speaking of God, an email I received from my synagogue shared the reflections of our rabbi, Daniel Klein, as he contemplates what's being asked of us and given by us at this time:

'It is a profound sense of service. Our physical distancing is both self-protection and an offering to the people around us. It is a way of keeping others, particularly the most vulnerable among us, safe and the systems that care for people functioning and not overwhelmed. In the last few years, I have come to feel that the most essential statement of my work in the world is from the Shema":

 וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔ אֵ֖ת הָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ֥ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ֖ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ
'Love God/Everything/Everyone/The One/The Oneness with everything you have"

'As we move through this experience, may we feel and be connected to others even as we are physically apart," . . . ."

I believe that few of the people who take care of my parents are Jewish, but I also believe that the good work of many of them reflects a spiritual as well as a professional commitment to serve. I think Rabbi Klein's words would resonate with many of them.

* COVID-19 Update 2 [E-mail to the author]. (2020, March 17). (from The Boston Synagogue)

Eden In Lockdown: A Poem

So already, with novel coronavirus running the show, I was inspired yesterday morning to write a poem, but not a novel. It's my general practice to sit with poems awhile before soliciting response and critique, but since this one is so much about this present moment, I've decided to dispense with temporal distancing, do some virtual social outreach, and publish it here in its raw, not-ready-for-prime-time state.

I'd like to hear from you about it. Specifically, I'd love to know about any piece of it--or even about the whole of it--any of following:

• what it makes you think, and/or 
• what it makes you wonder, and/or
• what it makes you feel, and/or
• what you think works, and/or
• what you think doesn't work, and/or
• anything else.

I also have a few questions I'm wrestling with, to which your answers would be welcome: do my allusions work**? are there too many of them? Should I explain the allusions in footnotes? I'm not sure why using allusions seems so important to me right now. Maybe you'll have thoughts even about that last statement.

I think there are some verb tense problems, too. 

So first I'll present the poem; and then I'll tell you where you can respond: there are several places and ways. Ideally, I'd like you to be able to see others' responses, but I'm happy for your name not to accompany your comments, if you'd like to respond anonymously.

Here goes!

Eden in Lockdown

        "Eden is that old-fashioned House
         We dwell in every day . . .."*
                                         Emily Dickinson

We hadn't known we were in Eden
'Til we learned we couldn't leave it.
But we had time on our hands,
Something we seldom did,
Something we seldom took into our hands
When the choice was ours.

So what to take into our hands,
Given the perils of touch itself,
What to shape to our most 
Private self or public need
When dreams deferred so oft to fear  
Since what happens next  
Is in all our hands? 

I started with meatloaf 
On the evening of the first day--
And it was good.
On the morning of the second day,
I bundled newspapers for recycling,
Wrote checks and birthday cards,
Filed clippings in folders where I'd never look.

I told myself what was still good:
Spring just days away,
Robins flocking to the neighbor's hedge,
Electricity surging through power lines,
Keeping us warm and and within reach,
Softening exile at the edge of the unknown.

Best to be placed on house arrest
When one calls someplace home.
On the third night, when the March wind
Silenced the whispers of spring,
I thought of those sentenced to the streets
For whom Eden might be memory,
mockery, or myth.

Okay, if you want to respond to this poem and can leave a comment below (I know some of you have lost comments trying to do this in the past), please do so. If you respond on my Facebook page, I will copy your comments into the comment section below. And if you prefer to email me your comment, I will also post it below.

Also, if you're a "See-Think-Wonder" thinking routine*** fan from our shared or not shared Project Zero days, feel free to respond using that format.

Above all, stay safe and well! Take lots of soap into those hands that you have time on!  Thank you for reading and responding, should you choose to. And looking forward to seeing you in the spring.

* Emily Dickinson, CVIII from Part Five, The Single Hound. 

** Black, C. (2008). "And God separated the light from the dark" [Cartoon]. Winnipeg Free Press.

*** Ritchhart, Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.