Saturday afternoon, stretched out on the couch, alternating between reading about the Green New Deal, indulging in fiction downloaded from the city library, and prepping for school. Big, heavy snowflakes distract my attention and I find myself staring out the window for long stretches. A very Ska Christmas is playing over the smart speaker as my husband explores new playlists. My college student daughter, wrapped in her unicorn robe complete with horned hood, is taking a break from essay writing and final projects to read fan fiction.

Saturdays were meant for this sort of relaxation (well, not the lesson planning). I'm grateful that my circumstances allow my this warm, safe place and the time to enjoy it.

Uncle Donnie

Anya was known "The Incredible Velcro Baby". She would not go to anyone besides me and her dad. Not to ANYONE. When Greg and I wanted to go out, we would leave after putting Anya to bed and the babysitter would sit in petrified silence, hoping she would not wake up. (I love you, my brave sisters and nieces!) When we were at our playgroup, I had to sneak off to the bathroom, my friend trying to block the view so Anya would not notice that I had left. 

That's why, when we had a playgroup field trip to the firehouse, we caused a big stir. 

Anya would not go to anyone else besides her parents. Except, apparently, to her Uncle Donnie.

Uncle Donnie died unexpectedly last week. I can't get this picture out of my head. 

ceramic memories

I knew this day would come; dreaded it for some time. But this morning, when I saw that today was the day, I shrugged and smiled.

The chip on my coffee cup might not sound like a big deal to you, but this hasn’t always been my coffee cup. It was my father’s first. His little sister gave it to him for some occasion or another. I remember her smile, when he opened the gift. She said something about retirement not changing the fact that he was a bricklayer.

I honestly don’t know if my father ever actually drank coffee from this mug. There were plenty of mugs in the cabinet. But, when I was cleaning out those cabinets, that mug went in the box of things that I wanted. That mug was a part of my Dad.

For the past several years, I’ve alternated between this cup and the lovely Polish pottery I inherited from the previous occupant of a classroom I moved into. They are my favorites and no one else in the house ever takes them. Though my mother never owned, nor drank out of, the Polish pottery, I began to think of that as her mug and the construction worker one as Dad’s. I took turns thinking of them each as I poured the coffee. I felt their presence, I visited with a quick memory each time.

With such a weighty connection to a mug, I feared what would happen when one or the other finally succumbed to age and use, or to accident. I feared the grief that might well up.

But, this morning, as I unexpectedly caught my lip on the new chip in Dad’s cup, I was unprepared by how OK I was with it. Things change, things die, and life goes on.

Since my father died, my family changed in some fundamental ways. I will never be a part of the larger family the way I was when he was with us. I grieved over that loss for a long time. I think, in the past year as my little immediate family changes with growth of our girls, I have come very close to being at peace with the evolution of the larger family. I am loving the evolution of my immediate family.

So, the cup is chipped and I should no longer use it. It would slowly, or not so slowly fall apart and I should retire it before I cut my lip or swallow a ceramic fragment.

It feels wrong to just toss it in the trash, so I might find a garden spot to bury it in, or scatter the broken shards in with the border rocks, but I won’t cry the way I thought I would.

Thank you, Aunt Lee, for buying Dad the mug. Thanks for leaving it in the cabinet for me, Dad. I’ll still think of you both when I sit at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee.

Urban wildlife in December

Cormorant on the Merrimack River

It wasn't quite 30 degrees when I started on my walk this morning. The sun streaming in through the window tricked me into thinking I was dressed right, but the frigid air seeped right through my jeans by the time I hit the mile mark.
I'm on winter break from school so of course my thoughts during the walk were mostly about school. As I passed a cormorant sitting on a log poking up from the swelled river, I thought about the spring life sciences unit and started imagining how I could get my students looking carefully at the habitat that is our city. I heard some ducks squawking back and forth then passed a small flock of geese in the shallows, but when I saw the little muskrat chewing something near the edge of the river, I knew I had to record this for them.

Can you make out the little fur ball at the water's edge? He seemed to be a muskrat.

There's a lot to like about Lowell.
#UrbanWildlife

my crazy

I don’t know why the things that stress me out are so stressful. Everyday things that don’t bother most people send me right over the edge. And I can’t explain to you why. I’ve only recently been able to express that they do put a strain on me. It was so hard for the last 40 years to admit that the idea of bringing my car in for service or planning an event for someone or making particular phone calls  inspired days of hand-wringing anxiety.

Perhaps I can’t tell you why because there is no good reason. What I have been coming to grips with is that there doesn’t have to be a good reason. I feel the anxiety and I have to work through it.And sometimes, I just can’t. The anxiety exists, good reason or not.

The stress of driving a car that should have work done is somehow less than making

arrangements to have the work done. It doesn’t make sense. But does anxiety have to be somehow justified?

Doesn’t that, then, make it something other than anxiety?

And, what people don’t understand is that I can thrive in certain stressful situations and still falter in these mundane ones.

I go to a stressful job every day, often with a positive sense of anticipation. I prepare by reading, talking, assessing student work, and writing lesson plans, but I know going in that nothing will ever completely match my plan. I try to anticipate who will struggle with a certain concept or activity, I plan alternatives and “what ifs”, and still have to think on my feet to address my students’ needs in the moment. Several researchers have talked about the stress in professions where we have to make hundreds of little decisions every day, constantly assessing, choosing, and then reassessing.

But, that I am able to work in this stressful environment and make decisions doesn’t make buying, or not buying, Christmas presents any easier (Should I buy for this person? Oh no, how did I forget to buy for them? Will they like it? I’m not going to give it to them, they won’t like it. Am I overstepping my bounds? Did I misread the signals? I hate Christmas.)

But someone loves my crazy.

I know that loves comes with its own frustrations, and I won’t lie to myself that it’s easy living with me. Nor do I think that it gets me off the hook to try to work through my anxiety and participate as much as I can in our life of servicing cars and planning parties.

But it feels good to be accepted, warts and all.

Snow Day

On a normal day, the students would be filing off buses about now.

But today is not a normal day.

Today is one of those joyful treats of being a teacher.

Today is a snow day.

It's the 6th snow day of the year. Of course, the first two days off had nothing to do with snow but were the result of dangerous winds in October that knocked power out for most of our schools and for most of our families and staff as well. We just don't have anything else to call them. Severe weather days? Unexpected-stay-in-your-pajamas days?

I know the argument against snow days. It means we'll stay in school until the end of June. True. Because of today's call, our last day of school has been bumped to June 20. And we haven't even entered February, traditionally the snowiest month in New England. But our contract states that we can't stay in school past June 30th, so I can still make summer vacation plans. (Family trip to Spain, hopefully.)

I was at class last night, a class for teachers who want to become specialists in reading, and we were all talking about the coming storm. "Has your district called it yet?" Everyone of us was talking about it, though some with dread.

"I just hope they call it in time so I can turn off my alarm and sleep in." said one young teacher who clearly didn't have children at home who would wake up anyway. "Oh, I want to get up. I hate to miss any of my snow day." I answered. That earned me some odd looks. That's OK, I'm used to odd looks.

But I know I'm not alone. A snow day is a special gift that I do not want to squander. Sure, I stay in my pajamas well into the day, sometimes even ALL day. For me, a snow day is an opportunity to read, to write, to make plans for that lesson I wasn't sure how to figure out, to read student work, to look at the big picture of the upcoming unit and get a clear idea of where I want students to end up. A snow day means listening to the radio longer, putting on a second pot of coffee, cleaning out a drawer or a closet that I've been meaning to get to. On snow days I put the kettle on after shaking the snow off when I come in from shoveling so we can all have hot chocolate. I eat a hot lunch, a rare luxury on a school day.

It's time for school to start and on a normal day I would have rushed through getting showered and dressed, making my lunch, helping my teenager get to the bus stop on time, packing my bag and making sure my coffee thermos was filled. Instead, I have read a chapter for my class, written a review on my 4th grade website for a book I just finished (and started a new book), put a load of clothes into the washing machine, celebrated the day off with my teenager (who just now got out of bed), and started the assignment due for my next class.
Oh, and put on a second pot of coffee.

Happy snow day everyone.

30 year old pain

Thirty years ago I drove my mother’s station wagon through a stop sign that I didn’t notice, or noticed too late, o didn’t take seriously enough, and into the path of a red pick-up truck. 

My friend in the passenger seat was cut in a few places by flying shards of glass and sprained her wrist in the impact. The driver of the pick-up fractured a few ribs. A man driving a third car experienced whiplash. In a swerve away from the stereotype, I, the driver who caused the accident, was the most hurt. I split my head open, took the entirety of the driver’s side window in my face which ripped my eyelid nearly off, struggled to breathe through my collapsed lungs, and broke my arm in 4 close-together places just above my elbow. 

My head was stapled back together pretty quick, though that injury may be why I don’t actually remember the accident, putting my faith in the stories of it that others have told me. The plastic surgeon used a skin graft to repair my eyelid and sewed in what felt like a million little stitches on the left side of my face. Still, I was still picking little pieces of glass out of my cheek three months later, a phenomenon the nurse called “normal.” And the orthopedic doctor did what he could with my arm. I was in some level of a cast for almost a year. It took six month before I could move all my fingers, another three months after that before my thumb would respond to my brain’s commands. If you feel my arm, you can still find the outcropping of bone that never did heal in the right direction.

I’m thinking of this accident not because of year-end nostalgia but because my arm hurts. My arm has hurt at some point every year for the last thirty, at varying levels of ouch. But the long-lasting cold snap we have been living in since Christmas seems to be the worst thing for a thirty year old break and I have been in constant discomfort, with regular jabs of pain, for three days. It hurts more now than it has in a long time and I’m hoping that this will not be my new reality as I leap toward fifty.

Pain like this can stop you from doing things. It makes it hard to shovel snow or open jelly jars or keep a civil tongue. When you are in pain you get grumpy, you get impatient. Perhaps that’s where the stereotype of grumpy old folks comes from.  I don’t want to be that grouchy old lady that folks tolerate. I have plans for my next 50 years and they do not include family members avoiding my company.

Nor do I want to be that old lady who talks about every ailment the same way some folks comment on the weather. But I feel like, for myself, I need to acknowledge that I have this injury, that I did not hypochondriacally make it up, and that the pain is real. And, doing that, I can move toward dealing with it.

On this last day of 2017, I’m feeling the pain from thirty years ago, looking ahead to another year, grateful that I’m here to feel it.