Reflections on Early June Events In and Out of School

How I wish I knew the name of this NQHS graduate!

So already, let me begin by saying that I had strong feelings about three public events I "witnessed" in the last two weeks. Two of them unfolded on my television screen. One of them transpired just blocks from my house.

I didn't attend the North Quincy High School (NQHS) Class of 2024 graduation*, which happened streets away from my house. But I did watch the steady stream of proud families walking toward the athletic stadium where the Class of 2024 was set to receive their diplomas. As a former teacher, I'm always moved by how joyful and meaningful graduations are for families: high school graduation isn't assumed in every family. And this was a graduating class who began high school during the COVID-19 pandemic and had to adjust to multiple instructional "new normals" over the course of their high school careers. Congratulations, Class of 2024.

 

As I thought about how exciting and consuming the end of high school is for graduating seniors, I wondered whether any of them in the days before their graduation had managed to pay attention to the two national news stories that had had such strong emotional effects on me. Had any of them watched the elevating, humbling commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of D-Day**, and all it represented in terms of the merging of national and personal sacrifice for the sake of preserving freedom? So many whose lives were lost or forever changed on the beaches of Normandy that day were very close in age to those graduating.

 

Similarly, had any of them heard Representative Byron Donalds' discouraging, dumbfounding comments about Jim Crow, which he characterized as contributing positively to the strength and unity of Black families? Or had any of them seen Reverend Al Sharpton challenge Donalds on the June 9 episode of Politics Nation****, also disseminated on social media? Donalds responded to Sharpton's questions with many poor answers and non-answers.

Because I know that such events create "teachable moments," it is possible that in their last classroom moments at NQHS, these students had experienced video and audio captures of these events and had had the chance to discuss them. I hope they did. But even without such teachable moments having been orchestrated at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where I spent most of my teaching career, few if any students would have felt that Byron Donalds got it right about Jim Crow. 

I have to wonder where, how, and from whom Donalds**** learned about Jim Crow. Since I am almost certain he learned that Jim Crow was a problem and danger for African-Americans, even if its most violent manifestations weren't shared or referenced as part of classroom instruction, I also have to wonder when and why in the last few years, he's happened or chosen to "unlearn" what he understood about Jim Crow as a younger, less political person.

I also have to wonder how many American fans of Nazism and autocracy have relatives and neighbors who fought in World War II against the Nazis and pro-authoritarian forces. How, when, and why did these present-day American pro-fascists become convinced that the fascists and mass murderers were the enlightened good guys? Do their robust "beliefs" reflect a lack of historical understanding; a shared, stoked sense of  grievance and marginalization; social and political pressure to unlearn former understandings; and/or undeveloped critical thinking skills, which are especially essential in an era when conspiracy theories, misinformation, and "herd mentality," as Hermann Hesse called it in Demian, abound?

As an educator, retired or not, I do wonder what role American education--as a set of practices, policies, and priorities--has played in this current state of affairs--and what "education" should do next. These are questions of vision and accountability, though education is at most minimally responsible for our nation's bitter divisions. I also recognize that I am asking these questions in the context of the recent vitriolic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion debates in which education has frequently been characterized as indoctrinating students. I'm sure there's been indoctrination in some classrooms, but not most.

Regardless of anyone's politics, any talk about school-based education must take into account two realities. The first is that so much of value could be taught in schools. The second is that there are a finite number of hours in any school day or year, requiring hard choices about what content, skills, and habits of mind should be cultivated in the available instructional time.

Kris Newton*****, key member of the teacher team

This question of what to teach in the time available reminds me of the disciplined, thoughtful work the teachers of the ninth-grade physics course at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School did years ago. All CRLS ninth-graders--not just the ones who like science and/or are apt to excel in it--take this course, which supports them in developing important understandings of the behavior of matter and energy in the physical world--and, ideally, creates in them a desire to study more physics later in high school. When passing a science MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) exam became a requirement for these students, their teachers worked collaboratively to identify which conceptual understandings, information, and skills had to be acquired by every student; which ideally should be; and which could be considered enriching and thus more optional.

 

Similarly, groups of history teachers, historians, and government and civics teachers have gone through comparable processes over the years to specify the content, skills, and habits of mind needed by all students to succeed in history class and life beyond high school. Given the breadth and depth of history, their challenge is always "selecting from" without oversimplifying complicated realities and/or overlooking historical events and narratives critically important to different Americans. Faced with the need to teach less rather than more, one possible solution has been for teachers to be completely transparent about what the required history course was "leaving out," and where and how it might be explored beyond or even within the required history course. 

 

Though I'm not a history teacher and not part of these conversations, I can't resist saying that I believe that every student in America needs to understand the causes, effects, purposes, and legacies of both Jim Crow and World War II. And every student has to begin to understand them during their  K-12 educations: many Americans don't study American history formally after middle school and high school.

 

So even though I've just talked about important content, I must now assert that lots of educational accountability is not about content. There was a method to my madness above in mentioning both the MCAS and Reverend Sharpton's interview of Byron Donalds. In an educational environment in which exam results are important determinants of their futures, students must develop cross-disciplinary skills related to literacy and logic. In particular, they need to become savvy readers of multiple-choice and open-ended questions who can understand what those questions are asking; what kinds of thinking are needed to answer them; and what responses to them constitute actual answers, not tangential or obfuscating facts or analyses. 

 

Upon recognizing this, we teachers at CRLS recognized that we needed to step up our instructional game. For example, because many multiple-choice questions****** require students either to infer from one or more specifics, to summarize, to compare or contrast, or to generalize, we needed to help students recognize and acquire the language signaling each of these thinking requests. This meant becoming more deliberate about the language we ourselves used to elicit student responses: while asking our students "what do you think" might lead students to infer, conclude, or react, they were better served when we used the specific thinking language they were likely to encounter on the exam. 

 

In addition, we needed to abandon well-intended but potentially misleading teacher mantras such as "the answer is in the text": too often, we noticed when we analyzed test data, when students weren't sure which multiple-choice answer to select, they chose the response that contained language quoted directly from the text rather than the response that inferred something from that language. We also had to warn students about the danger of relying too heavily on prior knowledge: something they understood about climate change, for example, might have nothing to do with the aspect of climate change being discussed in the reading passage about which the test was asking them questions.

As a result of our and their efforts, many of our students got better at knowing when responses to questions weren't actually answers to them and why--which makes me believe that when politicians respond to questions with non-answers, many American students know it. Fortunately, the critical thinking skills students develop in classrooms, even when one of the goals is test prep, are widely applicable beyond the classroom.

 

Meanwhile, it's fun to think of the scores these politicians******* would have gotten on the MCAS, given their penchant for non-answering. Most never would have graduated from high school.

 

Most Americans, especially younger ones who haven't sworn loyalty to particular political parties, employers, and organizations, aren't nearly as stupid, illogical, or hoodwink-able as many politicians think. In my experience, young people, especially when deeply engaged (though engaging them deeply can take a lot of effort),  are observant, astute, discerning, and thoughtful. Too often, if politicians and the media talk about them at all, they are pathologized, pitied, or disdained--or viewed only as a market or future workforce, not as people with lives in the present. Young people know this. They know how they do and don't matter to many of those who have political power.

 

These younger Americans, unlike many politicians, are seldom motivated exclusively by money and power. They have hopes and fledgling visions of their personal futures as they embark on the adventure of adulthood. No doubt as time goes on, many of them will encounter the forces in American life that pressure or tempt them to go against their better judgment in the ballot box and their daily lives. I hope the graduates in the high school class of 2024 will hold onto their values, their critical thinking skills, and perhaps, most importantly, their dreams, even if those dreams need altering now and again. I hope they will find sources of inspiration and hope as they make their ways.

* Photo by Greg Durr of the The Patriot Ledger: North Quincy High graduation ceremony at Veterans Stadium under a setting sun on Monday June 10, 2024: https://www.patriotledger.com/picture-gallery/news/2024/06/11/north-quincy-high-school-graduation-2024/74055686007/

** Screen shots of image found on the following link: http://www.outandaboutinparis.com/2011/08/normandy-american-cemetery-and-memorial.html Retrieved on June 9, 2024, and 

*** Screen shot of tweet of @PoliticsNation tweet posted on June 8, 2024.

**** Screen shot of Byron Donalds on The Daily Beast website: https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-push-to-make-rep-byron-donalds-donald-trumps-veep-pick

***** Screen shot of photo of Kris Newton on CPSD website: https://crls.cpsd.us/school_news/kristin_newton_chosen_as_2023_m_a_finalist_for_the

****** Screen shot of photo found on the following link: https://www.palomar.edu/testwritingstrategies/wp-content/uploads/sites/97/2015/04/multiple-choice-test.jpg

******* Screen shot of photo related to the following link on the San Diego Union Tribune website: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2019/11/27/standardized-tests-reward-kids-from-wealthy-families/

The Fundamental Things Apply . . .

So already, I write to tell tales of out of school--or really, out of the section of the skilled nursing floor of the senior living community where my mother and about fifteen other people live and are cared for. I debated briefly about whether I should share these stories since they're not my own, but decided to because they have something to teach that, frankly, I didn't know, didn't appreciate nearly well enough until just recently.

 

You will probably laugh at some of what I report below. But I share it not because it's amusing (which it is!), but because it's endearing, heartening, and, frankly, dignifying. The people in my mother's section of the skilled nursing floor, though they've changed in some very significant ways over time, are in some very important ways unchanged. They have pasts, stories, interests, tastes, and personalities; the ability to connect to others; and, in most cases, the capacity and desire to give and receive love.

 

On a recent visit to my mother, I noted that a female resident and male resident, both well-known to me, were holding hands* and smiling at each other.

He was the gentleman who rose late and relished large breakfasts**--and whose first question to me months ago had been whether I was a chemical engineer who had shown up for the chemical engineers' convention that was just about to begin. In his early weeks on the floor, he worried after every meal that he didn't have his wallet with him: how was he going to pay for dinner, his own and everyone else's?

She was a fellow late-rising methodical consumer of large breakfasts who knew the words to many old songs that she could sing with excellent pitch and just the right feeling. But I had also observed her on blue days when she repeated "Hello" to someone or no one and often called for her late husband, repeating his name both hopefully and hopelessly again and again.

But that morning, the two hand-holders were all smiles, and had eyes only for each other. Since my mother and I stayed behind when most of the group went out on the patio, I could hear everything they were saying.

Generally, she was the one who asked the questions. "Do you have pain?" she asked, and was relieved to learn that he did not. She explained that she had volunteered at nursing home as a younger person, and had seen a great deal of pain--so much so that "I began to feel that it was my pain," which led her to take a break at the recommendation of the volunteer coordinator. "You have to have a lot of character to live with pain and not have your life be about pain," she explained.

"Do you visit your parents?" she asked; I was curious about whether their answers would signify an understanding of their parents as living or dead. He explained that he did--at the home where he had grown up; less frequently, they came to visit him--but they did sometimes. The same was true for her, she reported. And she added that she loved going back to her childhood home.

 

"Do you sing?" she asked, "Because if you do, I would like you to sing me a song." He said he didn't sing, which didn't seem to bother her. She explained that her parents had been in the Jewish theater and that everyone in her house was always singing. She knew so many songs as a result, she told him.

I laughed when she asked her next question: "Do you think I am too fat?" I had to wonder if, were I to make it past 100 years, as she has, would I still be worrying about my weight? Ever chivalrous, he looked at her and said, "I think you're just right." Oh, did she smile. And then, of course, they both smiled.

 

About fifteen minutes later, he explained that he had to go. 

 

"Where are you going?" she asked. 

"Home," he said. 

"Where's that?" 

"Georgia," he replied. "But I'll be back in six months, so if you're still around, we can talk again," he said.

"I would like that," she said, "But only if you really want to." 

 

As he headed back to Georgia, I was reminded of something I'd heard in an episode from Season 4 of Shetland, which I'd recently been re-watching. Before meeting an unfortunate end on the ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick, Robbie, seen in the adjacent photo***, had worked at a "home" on Shetland. When he went missing, the director of the home explained how much the residents, mostly elderly, missed him. I'm paraphrasing here, but she said, "Old people seldom get touched, and they need it. Robbie liked them, and he would touch them; he would hold their hands."

 

The next time I visited my mother, I asked the nurse if the two hand-holders would remember their conversation. I was especially wondering if one or the other of them would feel bad if the other one didn't recollect their happy time spent together. "Neither of them will remember it," she told me. "But we've learned to put them together when either of them is having a bad day. Something about being near each other comforts them."

 

I was fascinated. One of the other staff people joined the conversation, referring me to two women who have been living on the floor since before my mother moved there and who were talking to softly to each other. 

 

"You see _____ and _____?" she said. "Sometimes one of them is the mother and the other is the daughter****; other times, the roles reverse." Interestingly, the one who more often played the role of the mother had no children of her own.

Knowing this made me understand a conversation I had overheard between the two of them a few months back. Sensing that her friend was having a hard day, the motherly childless one said, "You should do whatever you want. You've done so much for other people. It's time to take care of yourself now." She paused, and added, "And maybe soon you'll meet a nice man and get married." When the "daughter" looked at her quizzically, she responded, "Well, don't worry about that, dear; you have plenty of time." Such a reassuring Jewish mother!

So often, because my mother is in the late stages of Alzheimer's, I've gotten questions about how responsive she is: to me, to my sisters, to the people who take care of her. If anything, I've learned that different people mean different things by "responsive."***** For some, responsive means nothing less than being able to listen attentively to long stories and respond to them in long sentences. For others, it means recognizing who's visiting them and being able to call them by the right name. For yet others, it means smiling in response to a heartfelt hello.

I recognize the unspoken question of some who ask about my mother's responsiveness: "Why visit your mother if she doesn't respond to you? What's in it for you? And what's in it for her?" At this point, I don't feel obligated to offer answers to those questions. Bright eyes, smiles, and the words "lovely" and "I love you" mean "responsive" to me.

But since observing the two hand-holders, I have a new appreciation for how responsive people with cognitive and memory limitations can be to one another--and how important and gratifying their relationships and interactions can be in the moment, even in a series of moments, even over time--which no doubt feels so different to them than it does to me.

As long as we're alive, we never stop being people--which means we each want and need, by virtue of being human, what everyone wants and needs. There's so much that many elders can no longer do and do for themselves. But there's also so much they still can do for one another--something I didn't sufficiently understand and appreciate until this past month.

* Amanda Madden Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/pin/old-couple-holding-hands-precious--364862007283583548/

** Photo accompanying recipe for over-easy eggs: https://www.beyondthechickencoop.com/over-easy-eggs/

*** Robbie Morton Shetland Wiki Season 3 https://shetland.fandom.com/wiki/Robbie_Morton

**** Screen shot of an image on Pinterest: Her Campus: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/603200943819962895/

***** Screen shot of an image on the Texas Health and Human Services Commission Website (courtesy of Adobe Stock) https://communityimpact.com/houston/conroe-montgomery/coronavirus/2020/07/27/texas-health-and-human-services-commission-to-post-covid-19-cases-deaths-from-nursing-homes-assisted-living-centers/

Things Past, Pastel, Passing, and Returning -- And Some Poems About Them

So already, latest April and earliest May, for me, together comprise the most beautiful part of spring--maybe because the beauty of this period is the most ephemeral. But that last "maybe" may miss the experiential point. It's the abundance of breathtaking pastels that makes latest April and earliest May exceedingly and uniquely beautiful. Those pale, delicate colors create a seasonal softness, especially when combined with gentle breezes and mild temperatures.

 

Yes, these pastels fade or fall to the ground when the great seasonal leafing out begins, just as Robert Frost says in "Nothing Gold Can Stay"*:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf. . . .

But how breath-taking they are, how much they gladden our hearts, has nothing to do with how briefly they stay. Those of us who ritually undertake spring cleaning as a seasonal imperative need to march ourselves outdoors every day even just briefly so we don't miss what will lift our spirits even more than dust-free, shining baseboards.

 

April is the perfect month for National Poetry Month. Eliot and Whitman practically made sure of it with their April references in "The Wasteland" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Then there's poetry's unique ability not only to nail--get right--the ephemeral quality of early spring, but to nail it down so it remains permanently ephemeral. Poetry is like the girl in the 2024 official National Poetry Month poster**: she will ever be mid-air and mid-ecstasy.

For my part, I've gotten myself outside so as not to miss out on this season's nearly daily changes. A few weeks back, before the time of pastel flowerings, I was on the lookout for the first of the skunk cabbage, especially because I'd recently read and loved Mary Oliver's "Skunk Cabbage."***

Oliver's poem conveys the muscular monstrousness of skunk cabbage: it's "brash" and "turnip-hearted"; its smell is "lurid"; its "rough/ green caves" are "Appalling." Its emergence expresses "daring" and "brawn," not "longing" and "tenderness": it rises out of the "chilling mud," reminding us that "the secret name/ of every death is life again"--but, initially, life that perceptibly, undeniably feeds on and reeks of the death that precedes it. Encountering it, we feel repelled and compelled simultaneously.

One of the members of my poetry reading group expressed frustration with skunk cabbage. It's so abundant--and so useless, she explained: we can't make anything out of it. But to my mind, it's use lies in its offering early proof that life will again grow out of widespread cold muck and decay that have begun to seem permanent. 

 

I appreciate Oliver's elevating humble skunk cabbage in a poem of praise that reminds us that "What blazes the trail [to the more "pleasing" expressions of seasonal rebirth] is not necessarily pretty." Generally, I'm grateful for good poems such as Oliver's because of what they hold and keep holding for whenever we want to return to them.

 

In the spirit of the power of poems to capture, affirm, and preserve, I will now take this blog post out of the springtime woods of Greater Boston and place it on the banks of the Androscoggin River in mid-autumn. But its gratitude for poetry and trust in poetry's power will remain.

The reason for this abrupt shift: were he still alive, my father would have been looking to celebrate his ninety-eighth birthday on Saturday, April 27. "Androscoggin Riverwalk" is a poem that I believe captures and preserves his interests and sensibilities and his engaged relationship with the world. I wrote it originally in response to a poetry prompt that required me to write directly to a person about a place. I knew immediately I wanted to write to my father, who'd died two years earlier, about the walk along, across, and then back along the Androscoggin River in Brunswick, Maine.  

 

A shorter version of it appeared in the 2023 issue of the Poetry Porch, but I offer to you a longer version of it here. 

 

You would have loved the riverwalk.

 

You would have paused to watch

The Androscoggin flowing past

Sloping slabs of gray stone

Sprouting pine and spruce.

But the narrow swinging bridge

That spanned the river,

Offering pedestrian transit

From bank to bank,

Really would have interested you.

 

Gingerly, you would have stepped 

      onto it,

Then, gaining trust in it and you,

Continued across it,

Stopping just beyond its far end

To pore over the placard

That told its story:

 

For decades, French-Canadians

Had moved across Le Petit Pont

Going to and from Cabot Mill,

And church and school,

All on the Brunswick side.

 

Nothing moved you more

Than tales of humble people 

Who, sensing opportunity

For their children and themselves,

Left beloved homes behind

For promising new ones.

 

The faces of the migrants,

Earnest in the placard photos,

Would have stayed with you

As you headed downhill

From Topsham Heights--

 

Until a hydroelectric plant

Came into view, compelling

An impromptu discourse

On the likely ties

Among river, plant, and mill:

 

Chance encounters 

With functioning vestiges

Of thriving industrial times

Often drew from you

Specialized knowledge

I hadn’t known you had.

 

Your exposition ended,

You would have set off

For the downstream bridge,

Pausing for a final time

To wonder at the bright-hued flags

Strung across a nearby prayer garden,

And to ask what a prayer wheel was,

 

And then continuing on,

Your thoughts now turned

Toward home and lunch.

An avid golf and tennis player, my father loved spring; it was the declining light in fall that got him down--and made him look forward to the winter solstice as the signal of the sure if slow return of warmth and light over the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you for reading this poem about him--and the rest of this post. And may you enjoy this miraculous season, the poems it writes, and the remainder of National Poetry Month.

* Frost, R. (n.d.). Nothing gold can stay. poets.org: Academy of American poets. https://poets.org/poem/nothing-gold-can-stay

** The American Academy of Poets creates this annual official poster.

*** Oliver, M. (n.d.). Skunk cabbage. Famous poets and poems.com. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/mary_oliver/poems/15874

Tossing Notebooks

So already, so many notebooks, so little time--and space. The permission, combined with the encouragement, to dispose of filled, long-stored notebooks was granted to me in early January--and in the nick of time. 

 

I had just decided that the upcoming spring would be the perfect time to renovate my kitchen. But as I drove* toward my mother's senior care community on that rainy Monday morning, I wondered how I would manage to store my kitchen stuff while my kitchen was being gutted and rebuilt. In my small condominium, almost all of the storage space is already claimed.

 

On that gray, wet morning, an author whose name I can't recall was being interviewed on one of Boston's public radio stations. Discussing strategies for overcoming "stuckness" and depression in the contexts of both writing and life, she advocated throwing out old journals and diaries, unless one really had a clear plan and reason to reread them.

 

And oh, did I have old journals and diaries that I already knew I had no desire to read again! Somehow, though, years ago, I'd gotten it into my head that to dispose of one's diaries and journals was to devalue oneself and one's "journey" as a person. So I'd kept them, and planned to throw them out just before I died. 

 

Because I was already dedicated to no one else's reading them, I had carefully planned for their destruction should death claim me before I could make that final dumpster run. As the adjacent photo shows, I had precisely labeled the box in which they were stored, entrusting my husband to toss them without reading them. 

Three days after listening to that public radio interview, I pulled that carton off my closet shelf and emptied it. I flipped through a few of the notebooks just in case something gave me a good reason to reconsider my plan. Nothing did. I felt like the speaker in Mary Oliver's poem "Storage" who feels similarly disconnected from the contents of the storage unit that she eventually empties: "Occasionally I went there and looked in,/ but nothing happened, not a single/ twinge of the heart."**

 

So out those diaries and journals went. Like Oliver, I felt that discarding those notebooks represented more gain than loss, but my experience of parting with them was less spiritual than hers. She--I do think she is the speaker in her poem--equated unburdening herself of "Things!" with creating "More room in your heart for love, . . .." My response was far more practical and self-centered: not only did I now have an additional empty carton and spot to put it in once I filled it with kitchen paraphernalia, but I also felt emotionally freer and lighter, having destroyed the evidence of my bad taste in men during my twenties and thirties.

But, in fact, I had many more filled notebooks***--notebooks connected to my writing aspirations, notebooks connected to my exploration of Judaism, notebooks reflecting my many years of coaching and mentoring other teachers, and notebooks filled with lecture and seminar notes from my college and graduate school days.

 

It's been far harder to decide which of these to toss.

 

As for the notebooks connected to my writing aspirations, I've now tossed out whole swaths of morning pages**** that I wrote in conjunction with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Those pages fulfilled their purpose when I wrote them. The other notebooks I'd filled with process writing to help me generate or recognize writing ideas seemed to me to have less shelf-life than tax returns: anything written too long ago seemed to have been written by another me. So I've thrown out the notebooks that were more than four years old.

I am holding on to the notebooks related to my exploration of Judaism and its place in my life, primarily because their contents tend to reflect whatever reading I was doing or courses I was taking while I was in the midst of a particular part of the liturgical year.***** I do look back at these notebooks to understand how different aspects of Jewish wisdom and practice have resonated with me in different years. I don't want to forget what is still new and often fragile learning for me.

The notebooks from my years of coaching and mentoring other teachers I've relegated to the trash, though I really enjoyed looking through them a final time before I did: so many notes I'd taken during and after meetings with my colleagues who were always striving to do right by their students and colleagues; so many memories of shared commitment, dedication, and time spent. Fortunately I have books, articles, and artifacts by which to remember the spirit and work of my fellow educators.

To my surprise, I've been finding it hardest to part with my notebooks from college and graduate school. It's hard to let go of the wisdom of my teachers that those notebooks contain. So much of my understanding of literary history and history more generally, and the relationship between these, derives from the coursework captured in these notebooks. So many of my sensibilities as an appreciator and explorer of literature, art, and music were shaped by how, when, and where my professors taught me to look, question, synthesize and imagine.

 

Still, I can't imagine rereading those notebooks. So now that I've recognized that their current importance is primarily symbolic, I will be able to throw them out and to remember them by the adjacent photo.

 

When I first started writing this post, I wasn't sure why I wanted to write about tossing notebooks--but I was sure that I did. My husband Scott suggested I was motivated by a desire to divest myself of some aspects of my past in order to move more freely toward the future and new. But I'm not sure.

I have to admit, the prospect of a new kitchen makes me feel like I'm moving toward the new. But a new kitchen is hardly a perspective-altering voyage around the world. If anything, it's an investment in domesticity and trusted habit, especially because I like to cook, and even need to cook in order to feel that home is being home.

The full ending of Mary Oliver's poem is as follows:

I felt like the little donkey when

his burden if finally lifted. Things!

Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful

fire! More room in your heart for love,

for the trees! For the birds who own

nothing--the reason they can fly!

In the last weeks, I've felt more lightened than enlightened by heaving some of my old stuff. A kitchen is not a storage space; it can't do its job if it holds "nothing." I look forward to the task I'll have later this year of figuring out what to put where in my new cabinets. Cooking requires "Things," and the birds I'm most likely to see in my kitchen are chickens.  

 

* Screenshot section of a photo embedded in the following blog post: Popa, B. (2012, March 11). How Windshield Water Repellent Products Work. Autoevolution. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/how-windshield-water-repellent-products-work-43296.html.

** Oliver, M. (2020). Storage. Devotions: The selected poems of Mary Oliver. (2nd ed., p. 7). Penguin Books. (Original work published 2017).

*** Screenshot section of a photo embedded in the following website: Saint Augustine Catholic school. (n.d.).  Saint Augustine parish. Retrieved on March 23, 2024, from https://www.staugustines.net/fullscreen-page/comp-j8ye2ao1/7b5906bf-7052-4517-8b21-07adaccd182b/3/%3Fi%3D3%26p%3Dq8zel%26s%3Dstyle-j92fd4ds9.

**** I have blogged about writing morning pages; here is the link to one such blog: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2016/08/experiments-and-experiences-in-writing.html

***** I have blogged often about my experiences of preparing for the Jewish High Holy days during the month of Elul; here is a link to one such blog: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2020/09/from-field-when-toe-in-is-all-in.html.