Kindness Resolution

I have, lately more than normal, been reflecting about the the burdens weighing on those around us.  As a teacher, I see this in other teachers and teenagers, but it is applicable everywhere to everyone.

A few weeks ago, another teacher and I were discussing a promising young lady who seemed to be overextending  in clubs and activities to the detriment of class work.  We weren't annoyed or angry or even disappointed.  The conversation was more about if we should intervene.  On one hand, we felt we should but on another we felt that this uber busyness on the student's part was a coping mechanism to deal with some big big sorrows life has handed her.

Yesterday, I took Bell to a shoe store to replace yet again sneakers that she outgrew rather than wore out.  A young man greeted me at the door with a friendly and cheerful hello and smile.  He was a former student who in the past wouldn't have had a smile for me.  When I first met this young man, his mother had died and he had been sent to live with a step mother while his dad was deployed.  His mother had been terminally ill and had refused to extend her life, choosing to die sooner than later, and the boy felt she had abandoned him.  Angry young man indeed. It was a long, trying year and I was glad yesterday to see a smile on his face.  I am sure he still has problems, but it was a nice change.

I encounter another boy frequently at school who has lost a father who also has had a difficult time though he has a wonderful mom.  Many of my students have parents who are deployed in the Middle East.  Others are alone and on their own because they aren't wanted or have no families.  And while I teach in a fairly new, nice modern building, I also have students who live in deplorable poverty - the kind where running hot water is not a given.  The kind with a trailer house with holes in the floor.  The kind where it turns out the house I thought was condemned and abandoned still has a family in it.  The kind where the gross school lunch was maybe the highlight of the day.

To be sure, I also have a large number of affluent students who wear brands I only dream of.  To be sure, some of them wear that sense of entitlement  I find insufferable.  There are also a lot of students who come from the same background I grew up in. Always just enough but never extra.

Some of these students who carry all these burdens excel in academics and some fail. I am not advocating a free pass to these students - at sometime in our lives, we must all choose what we want and who we will be, no matter our circumstances.  I know that teachers tend to try very hard to work with students who face difficulties.  We know that if we were facing poverty or loss, we wouldn't hold up well and these are just children, children in big bodies, but still children.

What worries me is that I can't possible know all that my children encounter. No where in my attendance program does it say "mother died last year" or "father has terminal illness" or "lives with abusive alcoholic parent."  Sometimes, a parent lets us know or another teacher who is acquainted with a family will let us know when problems arise, but so often, students arrive in my room with baggage that is kept in the dark.

I am not sure what I want you to do with all this rambling except be kind.  Extend that smile, that gentle gesture to everyone.  We know we are to help the homeless.  We are to take in the stray dog.  We are to take a casserole when someone dies.  But I want us to be cognizant that those around us, those seemingly ordinary people, may also be in need of our kindness for their burdens may be far greater than our own.

The Stories of Being Us

Normally, at 7:46 on a Sunday morning, I would be poking Bell, trying to get her up so we could get ready for church.  This Sunday morning finds me snuggled into the recliner, coffee laced with rum and cream in hand, while Jack and Bell are still mostly asleep on the air bed where they did their weekly living room camp out.  The windows are glazed with ice and the weather can't decide if she wants to sleet or rain.  The forecast promises that I will have at least a glaze of ice to contend with later so no churching for us.

The animals have been very unwilling sent out to do their morning thing.  The tv sits silent. The lamps are dark.  The only sign of life is the occasional sound from the coffee maker.  My thoughts drift, reviewing the week, thinking of the stories we make.

Perhaps nostalgia is to blame, but my favorite moment Christmas Day was picking pecans.  After dinner but before presents and dessert, my dad asked if anyone wanted to go shake the pecans trees.  My mother and sister declined, having already picked the day before, and Ian was waiting on his girlfriend to get there, but the rest of us loaded up and went down to the creek bottom where dad had cleared areas under some of the trees.  Soon, the kids were playing some convoluted game involving nuts.  Tucker was up in a tree shaking the limbs while the the other men moved tarps around and made burn piles of fallen limbs and  Ben's friend Crystal and I scavenged for nuts that had fallen before we got the tarps down.  This sounds so mundane, but we were working and visiting and laughing.  It was a Wilson thing.  I thought of all the times when I was a child that after a meal, Grandpa would load everyone up, taking us down to the creek bottom where we would cut wood and pick pecans.  Sometimes, we would, instead, shoot clay pigeons  if the town cousins  brought some or bottles and cans if they didn't. If it had been a white Christmas, someone would hook the big sled to the tractor and pile the children on for a ride.  Looking back, maybe Grandpa was just getting us out of the house so the women could have a bit of peace, but sometimes the women came too.  Whether we were working or playing, we were together, all these strands of family that saw each other only once or maybe twice a year.  There are a lot of family pictures down on that creek bottom, smoky with bonfires and ringing with  laughter.

My heart hurts to think that those days are  gone.  The strands of our family have scattered like leaves swept by the winds.  With my aunts and uncles gone, there just isn't a reason for the family to gather anymore in that part of the state from which we ventured out. 

Friday afternoon was a different day, but it was day of promise for this new family we are, this family of Wilson children now bringing our own children home to grandma's house on the farm.  Later as we sat for presents and desserts and playing with Tuck's baby, I was satisfied with easy flow of conversation around me even as we had two new comers to the group.  We will create our stories.

Stories in general are the other thing I have loved this week.  Jack and I have been together in some form or fashion, first as friends then later as a family, for eighteen years. Even when we were just friends, he was my anchor in so many ways. So few people are able to build a story, write their own family mythology. .  People fall in and out of relationships carelessly and those relationships crumble.  Loved ones die.  Others haven't yet found a soulmate.  I am lucky to have not only found mine, but been by his side long enough to have a little bit of history. We have spent a lot of time lately saying "remember when . . ."  Bell sometimes seems bored by all this reminiscing, but she also says " tell me about the time when . . ."  I love that we have built this history.  The time we stole a cedar tree.  The time we got lost on the mountain.  The time I threw flowers out the window.  The time we . . . The time . . .

 As we drove south Friday, I held Jack's hand while he drove, easy in the silence between us, satisfied with thinking of all the stories we have shared, pondering the stories we will make in the coming year. Our time together is nothing compared to the lifetime my grandparents and his parents have spent together, but it is a good beginning to the lifetime of stories ahead. 

words, words, words

For the past three weeks, I have been counting down days, partly assuring myself I could make it that long until break (which is silly since it was right after a week off at Thanksgiving) and partly in a panic that I wouldn't get everything done at school in that amount of time.  This Monday, I was still grading rhetorical analysis essays.

I wasn't really in a panic about my on-level classes, but we are pertually behind where I want them to be in AP.  There are just more of them than me, and I can't get all I want done in a day and answer questions and scaffold for slower students at the same time.    I started out the year short twenty books of every single book we use and it took almost month and a half to get them in . . . So that was a month and a half of no homework, no outside reading.    Though there was much pulling, wheedling, cajoling, nagging, and downright forcing on my part and much angst on their part, we are officially caught up writing wise and only a bit behind  in what we should be reading.  I am excited that over break, they are to read the first chunk of The Poisonwood Bible.  When I first read it back in 01, I knew I wanted to teach it someday and the time has come.  

One of my big mental fights this semester has been this great hole in my students' vocabulary and general knowledge of history.  I have always pushed the idea that great literature is often a reaction to something a writer experiences or something going on in society, but that means one needs a bit of history.  My kids constantly say that they don't know what words mean when they skim answer choices in multiple choice or when we analyze a passage.  They are stymied that I don't need a dictionary. I am stymied because I am pretty sure I knew what those words meant when I was their age.  I am pretty st sure that my nine year old's vocabulary is as good as my juniors and seniors in AP.  And how, oh how, do they have so much blank space where knowledge of world history should be?  How did I know when I was their age?  I took the same classes they do.  And certainly they are encouraged to read more than my generation was thanks to Accelerated Reader programs.  But maybe, just maybe, that encourages quantity over quality. 

I did have a really good history teacher in highschool . . . though my English teachers were ineffectual at best.  More importantly, I read.  I came from a family who read.  We talked about what what we were reading.  We talked about current events.  Through my dad's job, he knew many people from other countries and we learned about those places when he brought them home to dinner.  My father doesn't have a prestigious job - he is an oil field chemist and we lived in Velma that was so urban and progressive that my class had 26 people in it. My mother who was a special Ed teacher before she became a home school mom read the Wall Street Journal every day.  For every book of fiction, she also devoured a book of essays, a biography, a history . . . 

As the semester wound down and parents saw that their child who has never had less than an A might be getting a B, the emails came flooding into my inbox. Invariably, they all boiled down to "what can I do to help my child be a faster reader, be a more sophisticated writer, and have a better vocabulary?"  And my answer is obviously to actually take note of all those suggestions I leave on the essays, but more importantly, read well written books.  And then we hit a wall because they often don't know what they should be reading, what constitutes well written. 

"What do you read, my lord" "Words, words, words."  

And so, I am making a list of those books that shaped me, shaped my my conscience, my world view, my essence.  They were fiction, but they piqued my interest enough that I then read non-fiction to further explore those ideas, places, and people.  To be sure, it will be an evolving list that includes authors and titles from now but also, more importantly, ones I discovered when I was sixteen and seventeen.  It is a wide and disparate list of genres and names, but perhaps it is a starting place.  Perhaps a student will fall in love with Bojalian or Kingsolver or Uris.  Perhaps the words will be seared into their minds and souls and leave a more important mark than just a bigger vocabulary.

If you have suggestions for this Rucker Reads list, be it classics or contemporary, please share.

Finding my voice, getting in the groove

I haven't written in months, in ages.  I would love to say it is that I have been busy, but that doesn't fly because we all lead such busy, busy lives. I could tell you that I have been depressed, but that isn't really it either, at least not the sorts of depression I have lived in the past.

I have simply been in a funk that has stretched on far too long.  I wasn't unhappy.  I wasn't sad.  I wasn't discontent per say.  I was just in a mental funk.  For months. Probably, a  lot of factors  each fed this negative spirit, but I need to be done with it and feel that I am ready to set it aside, ready to reach back in and find myself again.

This shift away from me didn't happen suddenly and I doubt it ends suddenly either.  I don't even know when it began, though I am sure some of it started when I couldn't garden or clean or exercise like I wanted because of my shoulder most of the summer.  Just now, is it getting better, though the bursitis/tendonitis problems are still not gone. When you give up aerobics, you gain weight. Then your clothes don't fit. Then you realize you don't have a stockpile of jars of garden produce because the garden was a bust.  Then you . . . Then . . .and of course now that I am doing physical therapy for it, I am not getting home until supper time and still have no time to exercise or cook the way I want.

At work, things are good.  Bell is having a better year that she has in several years.  But.  There is always a but.  At home, Jack and I have been out of sync. Not fighting, not mad, just out of step.  Bell and I have been out of sync.  Maybe it is the stress that comes with being caretakers.  Maybe it is Jack 's uncertain job (the oilfield is all about uncertainty).  Maybe, just maybe, I am the one who has been out sync.

A few weeks ago, Jack and I left a very unwilling and unhappy child with my parents and went to Shiloh Morning Inn near Dickson. I think it was a good reset button for us.  Just us, no one else.  We only manage this once a year.  We never, never get away even just to go see a movie.  It seems we are closer to being in step since we came home, though we have had a few bad days since then.  Not truly bad, not the sort where there is door slamming and shouting - just that inability to communicate that ends with someone annoyed, but most days found us back to reaching out to touch each other as we passed through a room.  They found me falling asleep on Jack's shoulder, tucked into his side.  This makes me sigh with relief as those gentle gestures seem to let all the stress escape like air hissing out of a punctured balloon.

   We didn't manage to get that elusive picture this fall - the one that tells the world that we are still a happy family, that all is right within our household.  Either it rained or blew or we had a sick kid almost every time Jack was home for the last month.  I find myself not even wanting to send out cards this year.  Maybe we will manage an in front of the tree picture, maybe we won't. Perhaps I don't really need to do cards.  I am okay with that now though I was frustrated to tears about it just days ago. It will just be what it will be but it is not worth stress.


I needed this week off.  We spent a day with Jack's family and a day with mine.  I spent a day with Jack's mom in town stocking up at SAM's and Aldis.  Really, something was going on every day until yesterday and today.  The world is frozen, sheeted and slick with crystals.  A branch the size of Bell's bedroom came down right outside her window.  But it didn't hit the car a few feet away.  It didn't damage the house.  Jack is not on a drilling site or sliding into a ditch on a northern highway.   We are home, warm with hot tea, a sparkling Christmas tree, an Elf watchful from an upper bookcase, snuggly blankets cocooning us.

I find myself wanting to sing out my thankfulness for this life I have been given.  I know that we are supposed to be thankful during the holiday season as we remember our Lord's sacrifices and care for us, our families who hold us dear, but it is more than that.  It is that deeper satisfaction in what we have, that deeper knowledge that we are given what we need and are to use it, to be joyful in it.  And  I am thankful for so many things big and small  - for the gift of speech my daughter was granted that allowed her to confidently to give a speech this year, the jobs that provide for us, the warmth of my house today, my family who forgives and is patient with me.  I am thankful for you my friends who are still there reading a post from a blog that seemed to have died months ago.

The Clock is Ticking While I Savor This Second Cup.

It is Saturday.  I should be asleep on this post rainy day morning.  There should be a chilly room with soft sheets and silence. I should be sleeping in.  I so wanted to sleep in on my last Saturday. 

The reality is that Bella slept with me last night and started flopping about like a fish out of water just before 6.  The other reality is that we live in an old house with window units which are confused and thought the outside temp was the inside temp and offered me not a chilly room, but a warmish room and a place for the outside cats to perch and howl for their breakfast.  I did not manage to sleep past 6 until July.  I haven't managed sleeping past 6:30 until the past two weeks.  Thus, I should not be surprised that my last true Saturday of summer break found me flipping through Pinterest ideas for school at 6:30 A.M. while I sipped a second cup of coffee, a luxury only allowed on Saturdays.   I am not overly pleased, though I do relish the alone time so am letting the flopping fish sleep in. 

The weather is beguilingly fall-like, the air damp and cool, beckoning me to outside projects, to take a jog, to work in the garden. A wee bit cooler and I would drizzle some Irish whiskey into this coffee.   If Jack were home, I would con him into taking us to the mountains for a hike.  He isn't and really none of those outside things will likely happen.  A walk perhaps, but nothing more.  Inside tasks will be limited as well - I need to scrub the bathtub, to roast and put up peppers, to mop the kitchen.  In reality, I will wash the sheets, do only the musts in the kitchen and wipe out my Netflix backlog today.  I believe I promised the kid some board game time and we ABOSLUTELY MUST FOR SURE deal with her room.  In the last week it seems to have exploded.  

Back in the winter, my shoulder started aching off and on when I spent a lot time chopping veggies or doing serious scrubbing.  Then opening my class door and driving began to sometimes ache.  I thought two weeks of vacation might help, but by June, I was hurting most of the time and something as simple as washing dishes was really painful.  I made an appointment with the doc but wasn't able to get in until mid July.  An x-Ray didn't reveal much except that things just weren't quite right.  It took fourteen business days to have an MRI approved and another four to actually have it done.  Turns out I only have tendonitis and bursitis. (Three cheers for nothing major!) I started oral steroids yesterday - if that doesn't work, maybe some steroid injections and who knows what else - shouldn't be anything big.  In the meantime, I am supposed to be babying the shoulder. It hurt enough that I didn't go pick blackberries last week even though I knew where some were. I never pass up blackberries.  No weed eating.  No weed pulling.  Really shouldn't mess with those peppers.  No scrubbing bathtubs. 

 If you know me well, you know that I am not good at sitting still - I always have a project and I get really antsy right before school.  It is a bit like that flurry of activity women have right before babies are born.  I feel the need to get every big house chore done because I know I won't again have the time, energy, or inclination all at once  until next summer. I feel the pressing need to do one last fun thing with Jack and Bell.  I feel this clock ticking down the seconds to school starting.  Impending doom.  Stress.  Jumping the hurdles of state dept requirements. Dealing with parents.  Motivating those who don't wish to be motivated.  Grading essays.  Improving our test scores.  I return officially to work on Thursday and I am just not ready. 

Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, this uncharacteristically cool first August Saturday morning finds me perusing Pinterst for first day activities, ways to improve rhetorical analysis lessons, things to improve my teaching, and things to cook for Jack Dear and grow in my garden (you know, more of those non-shoulder babying activities).  After Pinterest, I looked at fall break camping plans and then a place for a Jack and I only weekend.  I know, school hasn't started and I am already plotting my escapes.  Happy Saturday.  Happy Second Cuppa Day. 

Hypocritically and Snobishly Wielding a Wooden Spoon

I fully admit to being a snob is soooo many ways.  I am snobbish about grammar and spelling.  I typically hide Facebook posts from people who are educated yet type exclusively in text speak and with bad grammar.  I own up to sometimes missing something - I type horribly on an iPad and phone, but typos and occasional misspellings do not bug me while phrases like " I done"  and "we wasn't"  and "I seen" make me twitchy.

Perhaps worse than language, I am a snob about cooking.  I grew up in a house with a mom who worked and still had time for homemade bread almost every week.  I am not even sure I knew you could buy pie crust in the freezer sections of grocery stores until I was grown. Let me say that I am not mother.  I have never made cheese or yogurt after milking a cow.  I have never butchered a chicken.  I don't make sourdough. I don't make pickles or any of the thousand other things mom does so well.  However, I do cook and if possible, I cook from scratch.  If I run across a recipe that calls for a cake, pancake, or bread mix it is automatically discarded just because I don't keep those things in the house.

I have always enjoyed cooking, but several years ago, I abandoned shortcuts like canned cream soups and mixes.  On one hand, I find making a cream soup starting with a roux to be magic; satisfaction swells in me as I transform something as simple as butter and flour and cream into rich, smooth, thick, bubbly sauces.  I have a love affair with my stand mixer, food processor and blender, but I am happiest when my tools are an old fashioned wire whisk and wooden spoon.  The simplicity of tools while making something divine appeals to me.   It is amplified when I am using ingredients from our land and garden to make something for my family, but that is a different post.  For now, just know that even though that wild plum jam was a mess Saturday, I loved the doing of it. An added bonus is that Bella is taking some interest in the kitchen happenings.  For now, she doesn't have to learn how to make jelly or pie crust right now; it is enough that she knows these things can be made instead of just purchased.

On the other hand, over the past few years, we have been conscious of how much processed food we eat - the more I cook from basic ingredients, the less processed food we eat.  Look at what is in my mixing bowl on bread day.  Look at the label on a loaf of store bread - they are not the same.  Salad dressing, salsa, cornbread dressing, pimento cheese salad . . . The list is never ending and has the same results.  These foods are full of extra junk that I am convinced our bodies just don't need.  I really do avoid products that have more than five ingredients and I buy organic when I can, though where we live, it often isn't even an option.

While I love to cook and love to make sure we eat clean, I also recognize that my family doesn't buy into this as much as I do.  I also know sometimes, we just have to break the rules.  I still buy Bella ice cream because she doesn't care for homemade (but I am choosy and a careful label reader).  We buy mustard and mayo and sandwhich bread and so many other things.  I buy chips and cheese and pasta,  and sometimes, I even buy a pizza because while I love to cook and care about what we eat, I also work and exercise and have a kid and a husband and a garden.  I have a life beyond the kitchen and garden.

Yes, the pancakes Bella has been consuming daily are from basic ingredients found in my cabinet and fridge and not from a box.  Yes, when I made shortbread and peaches and whipped cream last night, the whipped cream started out as a carton of heavy cream in my mixing bowl.  Yes, I am puzzled by what other people put in their shopping carts (at least until we are in a trip and I am buying some of those same premade packages of food, hoping no one looks in my cart or until I am neck deep in papers and handing my kid a frozen pizza for supper).

Yes, I am a hypocrit - I sometimes fall off the wagon of clean eating and whole foods, not processed
foods while at the same time wondering why my grandmother even owns pancake mix.  But I am also
snobbishly pleased when good food, real food finds its way from my stove to my family mouths.

Forty Panic

I stood in front of the mirror this morning doing a bit of serious lamenting.  Fine lines are beginning to etch the corners of my eyes.  There are some splotches on my cheekbones, the kind that come from sun and age.  There are five more pounds than there were this time last year and I just can't seem to shake them.  My shoulder and knee joints hurt more than they don't.  But this morning's lament was not sparked by those things.  Instead, for the second time in one week, I found a silvery hair.  The second time.  In one week.  My stylist told me a year ago that she saw a bit of silver, but I had never spotted it until this week.  It came as a bit of a blow.

I fully realize that in a few months I will be forty.  I know I cannot complain because if I am headed to forty, then Dear Jack is headed to fifty, but I am starting to panic a bit at this whole aging thing.  Some of it is panic that we aren't doing what we want relationship wise  or career wise, mostly because we are stretched too thin time wise. What if by the time we can get the farm and orchard going, we are too old?  What if by the time we aren't responsible for Isabella and  Rubilee and Harold twenty four seven, we don't have what it takes for crazy, passionate sex? What if we aren't able to travel and see the world?  As it is, I see some serious lags in the amount of energy we have compared to even fiver years ago.

At the same time I was lamenting this whole aging problem, I was also satisfied, even pleased, with what I saw in the mirror this morning.   Right before school was out, one of my students made the "Wow!  You are older than my mom!" comment and then asked if I missed being young.  You know, despite the silver hair and the lines and aches, I really do not miss being young.  Most of highschool was stressful and miserable.  I had a few close friends but I mostly was on the fringes of highschool society.  Often, I was on the receiving end of the cattiness that is so ore lane taming highschool girls. I don't think all that bothered me, but what did bother me was my own lack of confidence or feeling of self worth.  I don't think I ever walked into a room confident about ALL of me until I was in my late twenties.

I am not sure when I began looking in the mirror and seeing something I liked, but at some point I did.   I know that my body is not the same as before I had a child - perkiness is a foreign idea but stretch marks certainly  aren't.   My body is not as trim as it was even three years ago, despite my frequent workouts and mostly good choices in eating.  So, yes, there are flaws, but at some point I began seeing myself as attractive too.  Sure, doubt still assails me at times, but mostly, I am good with what I see, with how my body moves, with the way my clothes fit.


It doesn't hurt to be married to a man who freely pats my backside when he walks through the kitchen while I cook, whose eyes enjoy the me has, who touches me even while he sleeps.  However, a lot of this comes from generally figuring out who I am as opposed to who I tried to be to fill the role I thought was expected of me.  It is not a  realistic  job to fit the image of beautiful   women portrayed in media when your workout time is often sacrificed to take care of a family or grade papers.  I am not great at being as good of a cook as my mom and as good of a teacher as Amy and a sometimes caretaker and . . . I am just not Wonder Woman, but I am okay with being me.  I am okay with my political thoughts and opinions and likes and dislikes and even my body.  It is certainly more fun to enjoy all of me than to fret about what I am or am not. It is okay that I don't fit into the images expected of me.  I will take this me, silver hairs and all.