Vocation Revelation

The temperature has plummeted below freezing as I stand on the sidewalk, turning lethargic and useless fingers and toes that were once pleasantly active. I have not dressed for this, I think to myself, shoving my hands deep into the pockets of a wool jacket. I'm listening to Christmas music on headphones, standing on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle, surrounded by a swarm of irritated shoppers, all marooned in a slushy city two days before Christmas. Grimy grey snow turns the streets to hardened arteries, slowing traffic to a standstill and somehow eating most of the city's Metro buses. Every other bus is headed back to the terminal, and most of the ones stopping at this ill-fated stop are headed north to the suburbs. Of the three buses that go back to my neighborhood, the rumor on the street is that only one is still running.

I'm thinking ironically of the newspaper article I read a few days ago, back when we were still in the part of the storm when school should have been happening. It was called "Five Antidotes to Cabin Fever," and it listed five charming distractions available to families after they took the bus to downtown Seattle. The comments under the online version became increasingly annoyed over the next few days, as the buses stop running and downtown becomes something of a trap. You can get here, for work or play or shopping, but you may be stuck down there until the snow melts.

I peer up the hill, south along Fourth, there is a bus in the distance, and I vow that if it is not my bus I'll walk home. It is a foolish vow, one easily broken, but I'm just cold and irritated enough to attempt it. I have no idea how far it is, really, or how exactly I'll get there. I know that between here and home there are several rather busy arterial roads and at least one gigantic bridge, which may or may not have a sidewalk. The other alternative is a bike path through train yards. I am cold enough and mad enough to do either, if this bus is not the right one.

"TO TERMINAL" reads the bus.

"We've been abandoned!" I wail. "That's it. I'm walking."

This statement, made aloud for no particular reason, catches the attention of a woman standing nearby. She is much older than I am, wearing a knit hat, thick ski gloves, and shiny red vinyl shoes. She looks up.

"Are you going to Magnolia?" she asks then, not waiting for a reply, declares, "I'll go with you."

This is a surprise, and not entirely a pleasant one. To my shame, I am often a genuine representation of my city, outwardly friendly for extremely brief encounters. This will not be a brief encounter; our remote corner of the city is not close, by any means. A better part of me scolds the aloof part soundly, and I pull the headphones out of my ears and stuff them in a pocket. I'm going on a trek with a stranger.

We talk for a while about the weather. This is crazy weather for Seattle, we agree. The buses are deeply flawed, and the disservice done to a whole neighborhood is unforgivable. We walk along the bus route hopefully, checking in with the stranded at every stop, asking for news of buses and feeling vindicated in our decision when we learn that none have come in hours.

As we near the edges of the skyscrapers, we begin to talk about work. I learn that she is a weaver and works from home, but this seems like a recent career change. Before I can gain any further details, she turns the question back on me.

"What do you do?"

It is only much later that I will be surprised at the difference three years has made in the answer to this question. The words are the same, of course, but the tone, the posture, the feeling behind them has all transformed. I used to shrug resignedly, even sigh, my tone all embarrassment and apology. I felt plain and common, and projected judgments from my interrogators back onto myself. Today, the words come easily and proudly.

"I'm a schoolteacher. I teach ninth grade English."

"A teacher!" my walking companion sighs delightedly. "I was a teacher. I taught high school French. I loved teaching high school."

"What was your favorite grade to teach?"

"Tenth. They know... nothing. They are just so awful. But so wonderful, you know? So much fun."

I do know. Incredible, the sense of understanding that comes with a shared vocation! We compare notes of her girls' Catholic school to my urban public one. We praise snow days, the delight of loving them as adults, beginning to reconcile with the snow that has necessitated this quest. We talk about language and literature, learning and travel with young people. For miles and miles, a discussion of teaching carries two teachers from downtown along the waterfront as the winter sun sets.

When we part ways in Magnolia, I walk home amazed by the conversation. I have been so unsure about and hurt by teaching in the past that I have hesitated to even admit that I work at a school, much less claim the title of "teacher." Today, I have spent hours telling and hearing stories about students. I think of my students and my school, every day there, with fondness and affection. Not because it is easy, though certainly it is easier now than it was. Without knowing how, I have grown into this calling, beginning to love it out of more than mere duty.

Othello

I am watching a student's head this morning.

The classroom echoes hollowly with the tripping syllables of ninth graders reading various parts of Othello aloud to one another, one at at a time. We are two days into a three-week taste of Shakespeare, and already I am sensing that it will be a challenge for first period, especially.

The students of Period One are well-mannered and docile, charmingly supportive of one another and compliant in even the most tedious of homework assignments. They have the highest grade average of all of my classes, and usually I am incredibly pleased with them. Our class frequently ends with an expression of thanks, on my part, for the twenty or so students that have begun the day on such a cordial note. I like this class. I am grateful for this class.

Still, this is not the class that will love Othello, or any piece of literature pulled from the centuries-old canon, dusted off, and sold to high schoolers as important. I've already given them the speech, revealed the secrets of education that they will be expected to know once they graduate. "You'll be at these parties, folks, in fifteen years, and someone will say something about Shakespeare and they'll expect YOU to be able to have a conversation about it! What are you going to say?" They shrug.

"What kind of parties have people talking about Shakespeare?" mumbles a skeptic.

"Not the kind I'm going to, that's for sure," grumbles a second.

My promises of cultural literacy are lost on them, these sleepy first students of the day, for whom dreams of being executives and actresses require too much imagination, too early in the morning. Nor are they impressed, overall, with the story in comparison to the amount of work it takes to understand it through the mists of 16th century English.

So, as a few brave students wade through Act I, Scene 3, I'm closely watching one student, trying to trace the progress of one of my biggest Shakespeare critics. At first he holds the book lightly, as if it is filthy and he is afraid to touch too much of it with his hands. He rests his elbows on the table, propping the pages barely open with his thumbs. I can't imagine how he can see any of the words. Irritated sighs occasionally flutter the pages in front of him.

After a few lines, he slumps over the top of the desk, straightening his arms until his hands and wrists dangle, palm up, off the front of his desk. His head attracts the most interest: he has placed his face--nose, eyes, and mouth--between the still-open pages of the book. I stare at my student incredulously for a moment, until I remember that the teacher stare only works if the students can still see me. This one is clearly hiding.

"Hey," I whisper. "Wake up." He's only a few feet from me, and I can hear his words through the barrier of pages:

"I AM awake," he grumbles. "I'm reading."

* * *

I love teaching Shakespeare plays to this group of students, to new teenagers in the city, even though the first time they open the books, littered with notes and unpleasant syntax, they look up at me with expressions of betrayal and bewilderment, as if I'd just handed out Camus in the original French. "Don't worry!" I crow. "It'll be hard at first but it'll get easier soon! Stick with it."

I can remember feeling that lost. I recall reading Shakespeare on buses and checking notes every other line, trying desperately to make sense of the thick blank verse, or lying on the top bunk of a dorm room and spending hours on just a few pages of Milton criticism. I hear Chaucer's Middle English, as a professor read "Canterbury Tales" aloud to us in the evenings of a study abroad trip, and we struggled to keep awake. Struggled to find our way out of the thickets of confusion created by too-old language on too-young ears.

But I also know, because I have been lost before, the deep satisfaction and sense of genius that comes when we finally begin to understand. Every year, I am surprised by the students who show up every day during these difficult sections of the class, ready to roll up their sleeves and work incredibly hard at decoding this story that they never imagined they would be able to read. I feel like a revolutionary, initiating these young people into a discussion that has been unfairly dominated by academia for hundreds of years. I'll never forget the college professor who, when asked why she had never taught secondary school, shuddered and said, "I don't even know if high schoolers can learn literature." I was horrified, and perhaps I have been working ever since to prove her wrong.

Because they learn it. Today I taught Othello using Lego men and a photograph of Venice. I drew a map of the Mediterranean and traced the movements of Venetian and Turkish fleets. Students pointed to one another to explain the complicated web of lies and love that makes this story brilliant and difficult. It is not theory or criticism, not restricted to theme or technique or characterization. There are days that I long to retreat, away from the noise and apathy and discipline, back to school, to get a degree that earns me the right to teach motivated students in a quiet college classroom somewhere. But these days are filled with reasons to read Shakespeare and Lego men and boys falling asleep with books on their faces and kids who will grow up feeling they can learn anything. And I'm glad, once again, that I'm still here.

Thirteen Hours

Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. ... Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare. Jeremiah 29:5,7

Just outside the classroom windows, past the handprint of some warm student desperate for fresh air, the sunset is glorious at five minutes to five. A glow hides behind the ridge that separates the Bitter Lake neighborhood from the sea, and I can imagine away all the barriers, hundreds of miles of them, between us and the Pacific Ocean, where doubtless a grand show is going on.

The sight is so spectacular that I rifle through my purse for a moment and fish out a camera, determined to capture the moment. It is only when I have the scene framed in a digtal screen that I realize an artistic dilemma. At the top is the sky, shot through with color and clouds that slant toward the brightest point, a grammar-school version of a sunset that I've only seen in Crayola. Beneath the child's sky are a few scrawny trees left after the Bitter Lake apartment complexes. Among the trees shine the streetlights and the neon signs of the Upper Aurora business district; Outback Steakhouse and Abbey Party Rentals peirce the trees' even silhouettes. In the foreground of the screen stands the rest of my school, the Auto Shop and the covered walkways, enveloped for a construction project in chain-link fence and grey-painted plywood. I zoom in and out, cutting off the rough edges and then embracing them again, battling with myself over whether or not to put my school in the picture. I take two pictures, resolving to decide later what to do with them.




I'll have plenty of time to think. Today is a thirteen-hour Tuesday, but the hours are not filled in a way to make them move quickly. The first six are the regular pace, as I hop from page to page of A Raisin in the Sun, discussing race and relationships with ninth graders. I even give up my role as "narrator" today (drab reader of stage directions) to four students, who embue the role with tonal commentaries all their own. I revel in the sound of teenagers of all backgrounds pronouncing the specific and dailectic drama of Lorraine Hansberry; in their multicultural voices, a play about prejudice, family, and ethnic identity becomes the most relevant work we've encountered yet. They love it, and I love it with them. The regular school day, though occasionally challenging, is teaching at its most enjoyable.

The next seven hours are uneven and mysterious. I copy edit the student newspaper, discussing dangling participles and whether or not the "party" of the Democratic Party should be capitalized. I sort the contents the rolling journalism cart (a metal shelving unit with wheels, where I tend to stack old newspapers at random), and some students and I spend several minutes poring over pasted-up issues from the 1980s. We decide that we're grateful for computers. I discuss responsible student journalism with a ruffled editor-in-chief who is smarting over this article in the Seattle Times. I reread the completed parts of the paper, this time nervously scanning the page for the slanderous remarks that have put this other school in such deep touble. Later, when most of the students leave, I remain with a few layout editors, offering lollipops like a Kindergarten teacher, which pleases these hardworking seniors to a remarkable degree.

After a while even they go home, leaving me with two more hours to spend in an empty classroom, waiting for the evening meeting at the end of this long day. I sweep the floor. Go to McDonalds near the mall for some Dollar Menu supper. Watch a movie for class tomorrow while eating a chicken sandwich and fries. It is all very quiet, very plain. At six thirty, I make a cup of tea and go down to the cafeteria, where the meeting is taking place.

This is no ordinary meeting. It is, instead, a public hearing regarding a building project that our school district began two years ago. The proposed project is to add a new twelve-classroom wing, replacing rickety portable structures at the cost of part of a forest adjacent to the school. The project has been contested since its inception, and tonight is the culmination of the conflict, a place where a magic podium gives voice to all.

As I enter the cafeteria, which is beginning to fill with an odd mixture of irate neighbors and sign-bearing teenagers, I realize that this day has not been glamorous, by any stretch. This meeting seems in many ways the height of all things mundane. There will be no "Sex and the City" episode of this day. No one but me would care to write about it. I could write about the beauty of democracy, I suppose, but in truth democracy consists most purely in places and forums like this, in cafeterias that still smell like lunch, with people who aren't out doing the things that make it into sitcoms. There is nothing here that I could paint in a picture, nothing I could even write a poem about. Public hearings are prose-only situations.

I have to go back to the classroom for extra copies of the student newspaper, which features an article titled "TIMBER?!" on the cover. When I come back, I find that the once-empty seats around me have filled with students. Only a few speakers into the meeting, I realize the benefit of sitting on the "kid side" of the room. Each opinion is met with passion from the young adults around me. With great pride and admiration, I watch my students--many of them seniors who will never see the proposed improvements--take the podium. They are articulate and well-informed, and back in the seats they respond even to those with whom they disagree with efforts at understanding. I, wraith of a teacher exhausted in the thirteenth hour, am suddenly content.

I am struck by the importance of truth, even more than beauty. This is not a spectacular moment by many standards, not one that I would have chosen. This meeting springs out of controversy that costs our school district and our students both time and money. And yet, sitting in a cafeteria surrounded by young people learning to participate in their community, I don't want to miss a second.

When I come home, I find the whole photograph. Sunset, trees, lights, and building project.

Things My Students Say #3

Me: Do you want to hear something exciting?

Students: Sure... Yeah, tell us something.

Me: Think about how old you are.

Student: 14!

Me: In your head. Do you have it?

Students nod.

Me: OK, add four. Are you voting in the next election? Happy or sad, are you getting involved?

Students cheer!

* * *

Student: Ms. D, did you know that if all the states were the same, then McCain would have beat Obama?

Me: Sure. I mean, that doesn't make sense. They're NOT all the same.

Student: I know. I'm just saying. Gosh.

* * *

Me: Good morning, Period Two! Please get out your journals. OK, we're writing New Quarter Resolutions today. Who knows what a resolution is?

Student: (raises hand) OBAMA!

Pay No Attention to the Rat in the Corner

It's Monday morning, and my students and I are sleepy as I put up the next artifact. We have been analyzing various "artifacts" for their tone. It's been fun, since the artifacts are multimedia; the first three were songs, the next are pictures, and later we'll watch some movie clips and read from the novels we've studied. My students, predictably, are excited to watch any amount of a movie on a Monday morning, no matter how brief or unsatisfying. I, also predictably, am excited to talk about tone, this sophisticated literary concept that I've never quite gotten to with ninth graders. This will be the year, I think optimistically, as I provide mini-definitions for words like "sardonic" (dark and sarcastic) and "lugubrious" (sad... really sad... kind of ridiculously sad).

I like talking about tone because it is a concept that we can carry beyond the abstractions of literature into the broader world of all artistic expression. I daydream about these kids, in eight years, standing in the Tate Modern in London and discussing the tone of cubist paintings. Then they will go to a cafe and discuss the tone of Ezra Pound as opposed to T.S. Eliot, before taking their tone-aware selves to the movies, where they will undoubtedly be watching for shots, acting, and setting that denotes a specific attitude toward life, the world, suffering, etc. Tone, in other words, is the gateway into several conversations that deeply interest me.

As we finish up with the three songs--all from movie scores, all instrumental--I put up a picture. It is from a masterpiece picture book, loaned to me by our zealous librarian, called The Arrival. The pictures are dusky, hazy dreamworlds, each filled with a play of light and darkness that inspires and delights. I want to sit with this book for hours, just making up stories. So, on the document camera, anticipating their squeals of appreciation, I share the first picture with my students.

"OK," I say, watching them shift in their seats to see the picture reflected on the overhead screen, "Write down some words to decribe the tone of this picture. Then, write down--specifically--what about this picture gives it that tone?"

I expect them to begin writing immediately, since the picture is a glowing scene of a family eating supper together. The tone seems clear to me. Instead, they are staring, perplexed, at the screen. I glance back at the picture and see the problem.

In the corner of the picture is a large creature that can only be described as a rat. It doesn't exactly look like a rat, since it is as big as a dog and has batlike ears, but it is pale in color and has a long, ratlike tail. It lingers in the corner of the happy family tableau, smiling and perhaps hoping to catch a scrap from the table. If it were a dog, it would fit easily into the scene. But it's not, not a dog.

"Um," I hesitate, wondering if I should draw attention to the alien creature. "OK, to do this right, I need you to not worry about the big rat in the corner. It's not there. Can you do that?"

Students are shaking their heads. No, we can't to that. Of course we can't. There's a sort-of rat in this picture! That changes everything.

I have to laugh, and resist the temptation to turn this experience into a metaphor for some aspect of life or teaching. Some kind of elephant-in-the-room scenario. But I won't. Because for now it's too funny, too ridiculous, the contrast between my rather pretentious tone lesson and my students, valiantly trying and obviously failing to ignore the giant rat-thing that drives out all thoughts of high literary jargon, pulling them from abstraction into bizarre imaginations.

Homes

"We didn't always live on Mango Street."

Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street


It's Tuesday night I am lying on my bed and catching up on some reading for my LA 9 class. I gave this writing assignment ages ago--last week, maybe--and I hadn't found a spare moment at school to grade them. I continue to be amazed at how difficult it is this year to find quiet space for things like reading pages and pages of student writing. This afternoon, a time that I had set aside for grading, I weighed the benefit of staying late at school against that of going for a run in the park on this cold, clear October day. Oddly enough, the park was victorious. But then the assignment followed me home, here to my bed, where words blend chaotically with the pattern of my bedspread in this pleasant room.

I've asked my students to mimic the first chapter of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street, a story of a young girl growing up in a Latino section of Chicago's south side. As we finished the chapter, in each class the conversation was the same:

"How many of you—raise your hands—have lived in the same house your whole life?”

In each class there were fewer than three raised hands. I knew this. A third of them were born in different countries, and another third are the first of their family to be raised in the United States. For the rest, I know that moving houses is as common as changing grades, and perhaps as frequent. My students and I have probably known hundreds of different homes all over the world. “We didn’t always live in…”

"Who can finish that?” I asked hopefully. “Where didn’t you always live?”

All day the answers poured out eagerly:

"Um… here. I did not…always… live in Seattle, before that London, and before that Somalia…”

“Oh, right. We din’ always live in… Northgate? Does that work?”

“Sure. Neighborhoods count, too. Or even streets. I could do it, too. We didn’t always live on 34th Avenue…”

“Where’s that?” someone interrupts.

“Magnolia.”

“Oh, right. I went there once.”

“Me too. I live there. Don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry.”

“So, I didn’t always live on 34th Avenue. Before that it was 97th Street, and before that… um, 19th. And before that it was Emerson and before that Sixth Avenue and before that North 66th Street.”

“That’s a lot of streets.”

“I move a lot,” I shrugged.

“Me too,” a student agreed from the back.

“So you know what she’s talking about. Now, I want you to write it. Your version of this chapter. It’ll be different for everyone. Some of you have moved around Seattle, and some of you have come from other countries. It doesn’t matter how far, even. This is about change, about home, moving. So, get started. In your notebooks.”

Write they did. For most of these classes I traced dizzy paths of assistance, repeating the same hints and questions to the perpetually confused, directing my students again and again back to the book for guidance. They borrow syntax from Cisneros and from my version, which I leave on the overhead as they write, but the stories are their own. I glance down occasionally at a sentence or two, or read a few paragraphs when I have time, but mostly I flit from student to student, helping with micro-problems and hearing little of the scope of these tales.

Tonight, two-thirds of the way into grading, I am weighed down by the magnitude of what they have written. I should have guessed that when I asked them to write about homes and moving and dreams I would in turn read tales of those same things. And that the stories they told, my students, would not be like their sparkling fantasies, which made me laugh for hours last month. It's so much easier, I remind myself, not to ask these questions. Keep the class in the realm of hypotheticals and abstractions, fantasies and academics. I could have avoided the weight of their writing, simply by choosing a different assignment. Write about a good day, I could have asked. Write about food traditional to your culture. Instead I had to ask about moving. They wrote exactly what I asked. These are stories about exile, loss, and upheaval. How foolish of me to expect the same cheery story of young-adult apartment hopping that I had used for their example. I feel honored but weary as I read their honest words.

From my students I learn of hopes thwarted and expectations not yet fulfilled, but disappointment is not the only tone. There are moves that seemed at first like the end of everything, only to lead them to places that they came to love. There are homes that were plain and small but surrounded by neighbors who spoke the same language and chatted in the front yard. There are apartments filled to the brim with people, but the people that my students love best in the world.

I look around my apartment, looking up from the stack of papers. It's not forever, this home, like I wrote in my own chapter. Not the home I dreamed up when I was in ninth grade. Though I have not lived through the same suffering, I find that their voices are telling my story, too; their longings for permanence, safety, and wholeness are mine as well. And with them I see great beauty here, in this temporary place, which is home for now.

In Print

"My name's on this."

The student has his finger on an article in our recently-published student newspaper, smudging black ink with insistent forefinger as he points out the byline. He, like the rest of my sixth period journalism class, has the issue spread out on his desk. The classroom, usually hummingly busy, is silent this afternoon, as the staff of eighteen students, one teacher and one intern examine the fruits of the last four weeks of hard work.

"I know," I reply. "You wrote it." This seems self-explanatory to me; I can't tell what he's getting at.

He shakes his head. "Well, yeah. And now it's... it's here. In the paper!"

His surprise makes me smile. A late entry into journalism class, he wasn't one of the ones who registered last spring, those passionate seniors with heads full of vision and news leads pouring from their fingers. He arrived a week after school began, regretfully returning to Ingraham for the second year. Given an apparently sparce choice of open electives for sixth period, he must have shrugged and chosen this one without much idea of what it would be like. Since he was a former student, I was aware of both his vast capability and sketchy attendance record, so on his third day I assigned him to write a brief article explaining the electoral college. Now it's this article--with his name under the headline "The Electoral College: What is It?"--that holds him transfixed by the miracle of publication.

At the beginning of the year, one of the senior visionaries declared that a student newspaper was important because it gave many students the opportunity to be published. I remember being impressed, but not taking much time to consider the value of that point. Today I understand what they meant, as I watch this student experience, for the first time, the paradoxical exhilaration and vulnerability of having his words read by others.

Empress

You'll be given love
You'll be taken care of
You'll be given love
You have to trust it

Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at

Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
All around you

"All is Full of Love," Bjork

I am sitting dazedly on the floor when the activity coordinator calls my name over the gym PA system.

I'm on the floor because the clothes I am wearing--a white sweatband, blue soccer jersey, and white basketball shorts--were not terribly fresh when I put them on an hour ago, having spent much of the last decade in a locker in the basement, and after a brisk ten-minute volleyball game I don't feel fit to be near the other teachers.

I'm dazed because an errant serve collided with most of my face, six minutes into the faculty vs. student volleyball game. I saw stars, like a cartoon character, and the rest of the ridiculous game blended into a hazy swirl of student cheers, exaggerated high-fives from my vintage-clad colleagues. Then, grateful when the fifteenth error led our speedy defeat, I collapsed to the cool wooden floor at the foot of the bleachers, happy to watch the rest of the homecoming pep assembly in quiet anonymity from the floor.

It has been a busy week, full of details and commitments. Along with the festive oddities of Spirit Week, for which I came to school in pajamas and dressed as a black queen chess piece, the regular and irregular routines of the day have worn away most of the luster and excitement that I would ordinarily take to such an assembly. The volleyball knocked away the rest of it, so that now I am watching the bizarre pageantry of the assembly with a detached and disenchanted gaze.

Then there's my name, in the middle of it, and I look up to realize that the activity coordinator is announcing the Homecoming Court. What is this? The kings and queens, right? I remember that at my unique school they not only choose two of these for each class, but the students have voted on two teachers, also. And that they must have chosen me. I'm the 2008 Homecoming Empress. I receive a plastic gold crown, a laminated certificate, and a ride in a shopping cart, pushed by the Emperor, another ninth grade teacher. With ten students we parade around the gym for a strange minute, amid waves and cheers and laughter. It's all so odd, and yet I feel grateful and encouraged in the midst of the strangeness.

I remember marveling with a few other teachers, at the beginning of the year, about those moments when I have experienced grace from my students. Times when I have been clearly in the wrong, and have asked for and received their forgiveness. I can't know this for certain, but I suspect that not all teachers bother with this, with the messy business of confession or apology. There are certainly days and weeks when I would rather not bother, when I would be content to gloss over mistakes and injustices, hoping that we could all forget. Sometimes it's not even pride that holds me back; a simple weariness tempts me to the easier disengagement. And yet I have never regretted these times, the conversations that humble me and bind us back together, conversations of renewal and healing. It is in these times that my students have surprised and blessed me most.

In this wild shopping cart ride in the gym (and for the rest of the day as concerned students make sure I don't lose consciousness in a volleyball-induced concussion), today I am surprised by their love. Calling me up from my place on the floor, flat and tired, to warm me with a reminder that we are in this together, these students and I, transforming day to day with such displays of love as a cup of tea, a crown, or an inquiry into the soundness of a recently-pounded forehead.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

It's the last day of September, and I've climbed a tree in Discovery Park.

I didn't come out here to climb the tree. I had a much more mature reason for entering the park at first; I was pursuing the entirely sane goal of running in a great big circle around it. Running and I have a long and tumultuous history--full of harsh words and ecstatic moments, disappointment and fondness--and today is no different. I left grudgingly, in annoyed anticipation of going out for dessert later, slamming the door behind me and jogging without passion up the drab sidewalk behind my apartment.

The circle I ran is actually a serpentine loop through forests and meadows, flirting briefly with the sea but mostly lounging in dim forest. I grew up running around a lake of the exact size as this giant park loop, but I've found that running through a forest is harder and more solemn than circumventing a lake. The paved path around the lake is packed with people, anyway, on every nice day in Seattle, while this root-strewn gravel trail is deserted at 5:00 PM on a weekday. Just right for a contemplative and half-hearted run at the end of a long day.

Every so often, a curve of sweetly crunching leaf-strewn path will remind me of cross country races, back in that brief moment that I thought I loved running. It was the leaves I loved, of course. I adored the hours I spent in the forest in autumn, drinking in the dual pleasures of fire-leafed woods and the cheers of my best friends around me. It doesn't surprise me that I have never recovered, in a sense, that first love for running. Take away the exhilaration of competition, the bus that took me out to those nice parks, and the teammates to encourage, and running becomes, for me, just pounding my feet down a path, running from the devils of diabetes and heart disease. Yet here, on the lonely Discovery Park trail, I thought I could recall some of that long-ago affection.

Other than these flashes of cross country, it is mostly the present that occupies my mind today. Even the teenaged running memories bring me back to the present, for the loneliness of running a race is the loneliness of teaching and perhaps everything else. Though I ran with others, there were often long stretches when, like now, I could see no one. I was aware of their presence around me, on the other side of trees or bridges or hills, but I couldn't see. I was--I am--the only one who saw what I saw, who ran just now, right here. In that way, nothing has changed.

Three miles of running and I am almost back home, when the tree--a large madrona that splits into a peaceful two fingers near the ground--catches my attention. Without much consideration I climb up into the Y in the tree. It proves more comfortable than I expected.

I wonder for a while about the maple leaves I see above the madrona tree, then trace their origin to the stout tree beside me. I plot an escape route over to the stronger tree next door if a bear appears, by some dire catastrophe, in my park. I consider the consequences of being bitten by one of those nickel-sized spiders on the bushes a few feet down. Attention wanders and flits, eventually settling on the layers of green leaves between me and the pearl-white sky.

I have always loved the fall for its quiet majesty, so regular and lovely, so resigned and stoic in the face of endings and hibernations to come. Yet today, on one of the first days of autumn, I find myself mourning these green leaves. Even though they are faded and tired, and soon will be an honest blaze of color on the branch, I wish that they could stay. Today, just for a breath or so, autumn seems a deep sadness preceding a long sleep.

To love seasons, I know, is to love change itself, and to enter fully into the depth of each time. To love the barren winter with a passion beyond mere thankful certainty that spring will eventually return. How, I continue to wonder with my Rushdie-reading students, can I invest fully in the truth of each day, even ones that fall in grey and dormant seasons?

The leaves, which today fill the forest with delicate light, will fall soon, inescapably, fluttering to splendid ends. As I sit below them, I long to embrace change as they will, celebrating with loveliness the close of some times, preparing myself for others with grace and truth.

Weird

Do you remember how that life yearned out of its childhood for the "great"? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"This book is just... WEIRD!"

I look up from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, hearing this breezy sigh of exasperation from the back. Glancing around my classroom, I see many furrowed foreheads, hunched shoulders, and chins leaning in irritation on fists, all these fierce faces glaring at me. Looking back at the book, where I see a description of a water-walking weed-being called a "Floating Gardener," I consider for a moment before replying. As I consider, the murmur gains more force, is echoed around the room:

"Yeah, it's weird."

"Too weird."

"Why do we have to read this, anyway?"

"Why can't we just vote as a class and pick our own book?"

"Why, Ms. D? Why are you doing this to us?!"

I smile at them to mask a moment of panic. Yes, I had expected this. I knew when I chose an allegorical fantasy about censorship, Islam, and the value of stories, that there would be rebellion. I remembered the state of many young imaginations, lulled out of existence by Google image searches and online video games, which would not respond well to the demand that they picture a blue-mustached genie, giant robotic bird, or this recent floating gardener. I am even prepared to agree with them this morning, that the book is weird, and that they are right to identify it as such. In later classes, I will be better at preparing them for the plunge into a fantasy city that they must take today, but it's still early on Monday morning, and I had forgotten how strange all of this sounds when it's unfamiliar.

"So, just to summarize," I begin in a break of complaints, "You don't like this because it's weird. Am I hearing you?"

"Weird!" the first voice reiterates.

"So you're uncomfortable? You're reading this and it's not what you get or what you like?"

"Weird!"

"Hmm," I shrug. "That's OK."

"OK?" the crowd cries. "But we don't like it!"

"Maybe not. In fact, maybe it's better that you don't like it."

How is this possible? I hear them asking, though for once they are stunned enough not to verbalize their outrage. I still hear it, though, in the silence, as they fight back against the counterintuition of my words. How can be OK to do something that we don't like? What about that is OK? We don't like it. We don't want to do it anymore.

And I'm not judging their logic. God knows--really--I've used it myself. Blurry edges and shaky scaffoldings are as uncomfortable to me as to anyone; I simply don't encounter the unfamiliar in literature as often as my students. These things visit me outside the classroom, where they are seldom my first choice of company. I have a hard time seeing myself choosing a book equivalent of doubt, or trying to slog through a chapter of confusion, simply because some teacher somewhere told me it was good for me. But I have begun this lecture on perseverance, so I suppose I have to finish it.

"It's OK not be comfortable while you're reading. Remember? I told you this would happen. This is hard stuff, not easy. And you're right: it's weird. And out here in the weirdness you're growing. Learning to imagine strange things. Trying to figure out this wacky allegory that sounds like it's written for kids but is really, really deep and meaningful on a level that you, as teenagers, can understand now. You're already asking the central question of the book! 'What's the use of stories that aren't even true?' That's fantastic! Keep asking. Maybe we'll know before the end."

It's not the answer they were looking for, or even an answer at all. I can only hope that they feel heard, and take comfort in my assurance that this is difficult, instead of the well-intentioned but demeaning teacher assurances of "Oh, this is no problem, kids!" In the end, I'm giving them the same words I am repeating to myself: Be present in all circumstances. In rainy commutes as well as golden sunrises. In ambiguity as well as certainty. Pay attention, because this wilderness of oddity is where the growing happens.

Green Tea in the Storm

Fall is here.
Hear the yell,
“Back to school!”
Ring the bell.
Brand new shoes.
Walking blues.
Climb the fence.
Books and pens.

I can tell that we are going to be friends.

The White Stripes, “We’re Going to Be Friends”


“Isn’t it ready yet?”

Four brand-new Ingraham students are loitering near the window—two sitting patiently, two wandering with restless curiosity—and they are waiting for the water to boil. They are waiting because there was a promise of tea if they can be patient enough to wait for it. Green tea from their teacher’s desk. What could be better?

“Not yet,” I shrug, looking up from the email I’m writing. “It’ll be ready soon.”

One boy kneels down next to the rickety green desk that holds a basket full of tea things, a plant, and the now-decrepit electric hot water pot. He’s staring at the empty teapot, a white two-cup affair, which is waiting for the steaming water.

“That’s the smallest teapot in the world,” he comments.

“Nope,” a companion replies sagely. “There are prob’ly smaller ones somewhere. It’s just regular small. Not the smallest.”

I smile and say nothing. I am surprised they are here at all, actually. This is only the fifth day of school, and at this time last year most of my students were too shy or too busy to wander into my classroom at lunch. But two of them are in my fifth period class, which has only eight students (consequence of many minor miracles of registration and staffing) and has grown extraordinarily chummy in this first week. Seeing me standing outside the classroom at the end of lunch, always holding a steaming cup of tea, they voiced the demands that immediately came to mind.

“Hey, can I have some coffee?”

“It’s not coffee. It’s tea,” I replied.

Unperturbed by this information, the duo persisted. “Can I have some tea then?”

“Not now,” I shrug. “Maybe if you come at the beginning of lunch I’ll make you some. But not it’s time for class. So no tea today.”

This was repeated a few times in the first week of school, until today, when they both arrived twenty minutes before class, taking me up on my halfhearted offer. Oh well, I thought. It’s a cup of tea. So I got out two Styrofoam cups from the cupboard, asked them to fetch a bottle of water from the water fountain, and began to boil it.

The two original boys now pace the room, wailing about the slowness of the tea and wondering aloud if it was worth it at all, while their friends wait for tea. I get the sense that the friends are curious if they are going to be included in the impromptu tea party. Also that they might actually like it more than the first ones, who seem to be essentially testing the limits of my good nature.

My thoughts and energy return to the classroom as I wrap up my email. It’s a pleasant place again, the scars of June healed and washed away by the promises of September. I have hung new posters on the walls, moved the furniture to include some computers and tables for the journalism class that I am teaching this year in place of one of my ninth grade English classes. At the windows are the familiar curtains and twinkle lights, covered with the origami balloons that two of my students made as decorations on our final presentation day last year. I told myself a few weeks ago that I was purging the class in an effort to keep things clean and simple, since I never want to be a teacher weighed down with eight file cabinets full of examples and mementos. Perhaps I also wanted to start over, and bare walls were the solution.

How naïve of me. Though all but a few cherished drawings have long since gone to the recycling bin, last year’s students remain. They are in the halls, calling jokes and news as they rush off to their new classes. They are outside after school, still watching the boys’ football practice, even though now we laugh about it, while back then I told them they were embarrassing themselves and all teenage girls. They are in the classes of my colleagues, from whom I hear tales of genial class clowns and abrasive untapped potential.

And my students, the ones who brought me through these last and hardest twelve months, are here. In Room 120 at lunch. Telling me about teachers and summers, classes and cell phones and new outfits. They whirl in from the dramatic sophomore world, in which feuds and friendships seem to have picked up without interruption, stepping through the doorway with a sigh. Some come to talk to me, sitting close and telling stories. Others have dropped by in pairs, or come in, realized that the dependable group of guests has dispersed into the sunny streets of Upper Aurora, and rushed out to bring them back again. Today I am hearing one of them strategize how easy it would be to steal a fanny pack, should they ever come back into fashion, while another peers out of the window, looking for someone. One sophomore girl decides to do all her homework in one lunch, while her friend laments how difficult her new LA class is.

I wonder what they’re looking for here, back with me now that I have no formal role in their lives. I wonder who I am to them now, so nervously aware the input they seek will no longer fall within my areas of expertise. They will ask about relationships and the future, not books or mountains, and I know that these questions will challenge me more than any that have come before. Yet I am filled with gratitude and joy every time I see them here.

I stand up as the water clicks off with a satisfying boiling noise, reaching over to pour it into the small teapot.

“Can we drink it now?” demands one of my new guests.

“Not yet. In a few minutes. It’s not ready yet.”

“Tea takes forever!” wails the second tea-drinker. The quiet friends merely watch, wide-eyed, as I get more cups from the cupboard.

“Do you want tea, too?” I ask them. Mute nods and half smiles reply.

I remember thinking, during my first year of teaching especially, that in most places in education the relationship between teacher and student was broken, perhaps beyond repair. In our mythical battles, teachers were the villains that threatened kids’ free time with meaningless tasks, while students were the ghouls that threatened adults’ sanity with their ceaseless noise. It was no mere wall that divided us—our positions were fixed on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. As I decant four small Styrofoam cups of tea to the mixed reviews of ninth grade boys, while tenth-graders bask in their experience and try to hide their confusion, I feel the barriers falling. Sharing green tea in the storm of urban high school, we begin to know one another.

Photographs of Hope

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spent a year there and engage in business and make a profit." Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for awhile and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that." James 4:13-15


Sunday evening, and I am listening to my father tell stories about my grandmother. Listening in the cavernous sanctuary of Bethany Community Church, with a few hundred others, as Dad describes a picture of Grandma Nadine, when she was not a grandmother, or even a mother, yet. The newly-married, twenty-five-year-old Nadine, who had followed her husband to where he was stationed in Colorado during World War II, is ice skating in the photo. On a grey pond, surrounded by white snow, she is alone and skating, one blade lifted gracefully above the ice.

I can't know how everyone else hears this story. Though I am often able to listen to my father's sermons on basically the same plane as the friends who surround me, tonight I am aware of the deep difference in perspective. Because they are hearing about their pastor's adoptive mother, whom they might have seen once, from a distance, a long time ago. She is important because she adopted him, raised him, encouraged (and continues to encourage) him in his ministry. It is inevitable, I suppose, that she is a somewhat ghostly figure to them, her outlines sketched by anecdote.

But I can see the picture. I have seen it, many times, pored over the photograph and tried to imagine my grandmother as a young woman. Her hair is dark, short and curly. Her sweater something I would probably wear now. I would stare at this picture and realize that it must have been strange for her, daughter of California's Central Valley, to be on ice at all. I used to wonder what she was thinking, wonder who she was before she took on the names of Mom and Grandma, the names by which I know her.

Yet now, as I listen to this sermon about the unpredictability of life, the refuge in God's faithfulness, I am closer to knowing the picture Grandma than ever before. We are nearly the nearly the same age now, the long ago her and the today me. Just married, what did she think her life would be? Dad paints pictures of hopes so beautiful, hopes that I know well because they are mine, too. And then losses are falling from him, as he recounts a stillborn child, an early widowhood, and the death of her oldest daughter. Each mars the stillness of her skating-day expectations, wrinkling and distorting them like pebbles on a pond surface, until I see Grandma as she is now. At 88 years old, the grandmother whose wry voice sounds over the telephone, whose handwriting angles elegantly across birthday cards. Yet, Dad reminds, she is still the woman who is praying for him, for us all, every day. Whose Bible is filled with notes and landmarks. The one whose hopes have changed, perhaps, but who has never lost hope in the refuge, the constancy of her Lord.

As the sermon concludes and some of my favorite musicians begin to play one of my favorite songs, I remember a hopeful photograph of my own. Taken two years ago by a friend, while we were on vacation in Italy. We are reading by some train tracks, waiting for the train that will take us back to England. After an idyllic weekend of sun and beaches, we are returning to our studies, reading Shakespeare and Graham Greene and Bruce Chatwin. Casie is staring at the ocean. The rest of us are waiting. I got a teaching job two days before, and am resting in the confidence that a new life is beginning for me as this chapter--that of the wandering literature student--draws to a close. Did I have expectations, that day, of what my life would become? Of course.

And not everything has gone as I expected. Or hoped.

I'm beginning a new school year full of grand hopes, and today I feel like my grandmother ice skating, or like the 2006 Kristi in Italy. But I'm pondering, even now, the inevitability of disappointment for those of us who hope, and wondering why we continue to do it. In my classroom this year, how many times will my students or I begin the day trying to piece ourselves together from the scrapes of the unexpected? How many of my students, these still-strangers who are wrapping up their summers as I wrap up mine, have already lost more than I ever will? And what does it mean when I ask them to face the year with open hearts and minds? How can I best embody the hope of Christ when I, too, face the certainty of suffering, along with them?

Hope is more beautiful than apathy, of course, but also more dangerous. May God guide us on this hopeful adventure.

Haunted

Olivia: Why, what would you?

Viola/Cesario: Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out "Olivia!" O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.

-Twelfth Night (I, v, 268-77)

It is a while before I notice that the actors are difficult to hear. Several friends and I are sprawled on blankets on a lawn in Seward Park, attending a free outdoor performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I've never one before, though I've heard that these performances happen several times each summer. Attendance is sparse today; perhaps forty people are scattered across the grass, most of us huddled in the shade, far from the stage. It's almost ninety degrees today--the hottest I've experienced all summer--and outside activities are by necessity very sedentary, languid affairs. We sip soda, nibble on string cheese, adjust purses to be more comfortable pillows, and watch Shakespeare. But all of it slowly, lazily. In combination with the varied tones and pitches of the acting company, who have the unenviable task of acting on the hot, sunlit stage, this summer torpor has confused most of us.

I realize after a while that I am not listening, either. Not to this. I am not listening, but I know what they are saying. I hear the speech above and know what words are coming next, like they are lyrics to an overplayed Top 40 song on the radio. I know this play, know it better than I thought.

As I continue watching, the story unfolding as it has dozens of times, conversations, voices, faces rise to the surface of my sun-soaked consciousness. I remember explaining love triangles and mistaken identities, remember the in-spite-of-themselves engagement of the kids with the ridiculous mishaps of the plot. Their final projects, scenes from the play (was it only two months ago?) come to mind, as I hear, in chorus, their voices mingling with those of today's actors. We tried to relate to it, to understand it, to make it our own.

Today, two months into the summer, I see that this play has become a part of me, at least. But not just the play. Twelfth Night is haunted with extra characters, with words spoken and heard and added to the mass of the literature. Like any book shared, this silly comedy is greater than itself. And only important to me because they--the critics, the students--stay with me now, as I start again.

From Austria

The three preceding posts were written this summer in Austria, on a farm which lacks Internet access. Enjoy!

Ingredients

These are without a doubt the worst-looking cookies I have ever seen. And I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of cookies, and those are only the ones I made myself. I shudder every time I look at them, the two-dozen pale, grainy cookies lurking flatly on a ludicrously fancy crystal platter in the pantry. The chocolate chips have melted down completely into dark holes, like caverns encrusted with onyx or, more grotesquely, like dead eyes, glaring at me, their creator, and swearing vengeance. With such horrors associated with the sight of these dreadful cookies, I try not to look them. After partially hiding them under a scratched blue plastic bowl, I return to the kitchen and consider what went wrong.

I have been making chocolate chip cookies since I was ten years old. Though I don’t remember the exact day of my first independent baking venture, I can re-create the circumstances well enough. It was probably in the summer, when our mountain chalet and five log cabins would fill to bursting with pairs and families of tourists or the more interesting hordes of high school and college students on retreats. My mother—the receptionist, housekeeping mistress, concierge, coordinator, registrar, and chef of the retreat center, Alaythia Fellowship—was probably hidden behind a mountain of potatoes. She would have been washing them and then dressing them in aluminum foil jackets, preparing for the baked potato bar lunch that everyone would eat in a few hours, when they came back from the high ropes course in the forest back up the highway.

As two families of tourists checked out and crunched their way down our gravel driveway, back to the city, Mom had probably realized that between cleaning the now-vacant cabins, readying them for the next guests, and finishing the lunch, she would have no time to make dessert of any kind. And high school kids love dessert. In this realization of her own finiteness—despite a superheroic ability to multitask—my mom probably turned to me, the ten-year-old daughter who could both read and operate a mixer.

“Kristi, can you make a double batch of cookies?”

I probably shrugged, then nodded, then pulled the gigantic Betty Crocker cookbook down from the shelf above the oven, and flipped through its grease-stained pages until I found a recipe. I imagine that the first try was fine, aided by the mythic luck of first times, simply because I made more afterward. Still a cooking novice, I think I would have moved on to another recipe if the first effort had been less than satisfactory. But they were good, these cookies, so I kept making them.

Since then, there have been flat cookies, puffy cookies, cookies that I forgot in the oven for half an hour, cookies with oatmeal, MnMs, raisins, and peanut butter. I have probably made chocolate chip cookies about ten times a year for the last thirteen years (more during high school and in the last few years, and significantly fewer in the kitchen-less years of college), so I am in my second hundred batches of cookies. This number feels significant for a young and non-professional baker, who has been during this time also a musician, student, athlete, youth leader, barista, accounting assistant, student leader, and teacher. At home, I toss a few ingredients in a bowl, the measurements of which have been stretched so far beyond Ms. Crocker’s original that I call the recipe “mine,” and less than an hour later I am munching on warm, buttery cookies fresh from the oven. The results are pleasant and entirely predictable.

Which is why, slightly homesick one morning in Austria, chocolate chip cookies were the first thing I tried to import from home. The first batch, I confess, was not great, made a bit too crunchy by sugar that was coarser than I expected, but the neighbor boys liked them so much that they copied the recipe—odd metric conversions and all—and tried to recreate them the next day. The second batch, for which I chopped up two and a half chocolate bars and used powered sugar, turned out better. Neither, however, lived up to what I liked and made at home, so I sighed mournfully as I crunched my way through undissolved demerara sugar, wishing for better cookies and blaming the ingredients.

The ingredients, I scornfully remind myself, were also the problem this time. This time, I was wishing for real chocolate chips instead of crumbly chocolate bar pieces, and so I set out to make my own. I melted down a big chunk of baking chocolate with other sweets that my hosts donated, like jewelry to the golden calf, to this effort. After an hour or so I was covered in chocolate, sickened from licking my fingers too often, and the proud creator of two parchment sheets’ worth of little brown dots. These, I thought, will be perfect.

Sadly, the Kristi-made chocolate chips were not perfect, melting into blackish potholes in the pale ground of my cookies. Furthermore, I must have put in too much margarine, because they are flat and floppy, sinking into one another gooily and looking worse by the hour. I curse margarine and its associated evils, demerara sugar that is not the same as brown sugar and, redundantly, the wretched chocolate chips.

I feel humbled and ashamed of these cookies, a little cast down from my excellent-cookie pedestal by this less-than-appealing display. So easy to make the same cookies, time after time, when I purchase the same ingredients, use the same oven and same cookie sheet and even, nonsensically, the same bowls and spoons for each baking venture. But take me out of my own kitchen, toss me into a foreign country with foreign ingredients, and I am just a lost little baker, grappling with strange sugar and missing my chocolate chips so much I try to make my own.

I morosely consider how often other things in life happen this way. I drive in the same circles every week, my car appearing at predictable intervals on the same roads. For ten months of the year, I enter the same room at the same time each day, prepared to pursue the same basic goal. Even the evenings are rather methodical, mostly recurring engagements with friends, family, church. All so precise. If this were cooking, I would have perfected it by now.

But the ingredients have a way of changing on me. Roads are wet or dark or closed. Classes are jungle-wild or stone-silent. Students are angry, or encouraging, or brilliant, or in jail. Friends graduate and fall in love, change jobs, cities, houses; each tries so desperately to stay on top of their own recipes. At the very least, I am changing, an ingredient in my own life that is constantly growing and learning and falling and hesitating. In the shifting of ingredients, it is no wonder that the things I do—those small spheres in which I am responsible for creating or managing or maintaining—seldom turn out the way I had expected. Sometimes, everything turns out so differently than I had hoped that it all looks unbelievably foreign, and I cannot imagine how what I have done or said or created can be of use or good to anyone.

I am interrupted from my grim consideration of botched life recipes by the presence, center-stage, of the most recent one. Guests have arrived at Schiestl Farm, for coffee and cake, and Irmgard has retrieved a plate of my awful cookies from the pantry. I am embarrassed, immediately. Put them away! I want to beg her. I can make better ones. I promise! This is not what I wanted to make at all! But, for the millionth time this summer, I don’t have the German words with which to defend myself. So I laugh uncomfortably, shake my head and shrug my shoulders.

The guests halt their conversation, which I have long ago ceased following, to stare at the cookies. The cookies, with their melted brown eyes, stare back. I avoid their gaze, and the guests keep staring.

“Was ist das?” asks the lady guest, still peering.

“Schokolade…” I fumble for a word for “chip,” and find none, “Chip kakes.”

Irmgard nods with encouragement, and the guests break into expectant smiles. They reach for cookies, take bites while I go limp, undefended, and all baking pride leaks out of me onto the sad plate. For a moment there is only crunching, and these cookies aren’t meant to be crunchy. Another mistake.

When I look up at the guests again, they are reaching for more cookies, all smiles.

“Sie sind gut!” they are laughing. “Chocolate Kristi kuchen! Sehr gut!” And the effusions continue, to my amazement. In the background—the part of my mind that stays in English while the other part is madly translating German—my protests (The real cookies are so much better than these!) begin to grow quieter. Because it is these cookies, despite their ugliness and despite my declaring them a failure, that have been a point of interest and enjoyment for a few minutes of the afternoon. Even though they weren’t the way I wanted them, they are exactly what everyone else needed. Despite the changes in ingredients and the stubbornness of their creator.

In the Kitchen

The kitchen is the social center of Schiestl Farm, which for all its virtues and wonders— balconies laden with geranium-filled boxes, rattling showers, secret passages between bales of hay—has no living room. There are no couches on the farm. Just benches surrounding the tables in the guest dining room next door and here, in the kitchen. The dining room is pleasant and spacious, with plenty of room for normal-toned conversations and three tables to the kitchen’s one, but here in the kitchen is where we entertain neighbors and sisters and special guests. It is also the fascinating world that draws our smallest guests, who watch wide-eyed as we prepare supper and wander in and out as we carry small trays, full of tea and coffee, out to the dining room in the morning. Home to the white, tiled monster of a wood-burning stove, its flat top strewn with steaming teapots, the kitchen is also the warmest room in the house, at least ten degrees warmer than the pantry across the hall.

Midmorning, and I am contemplating color as I slice apricots. I have spent little time with apricots in my life, so these do not take me away into memory as cooking so often does here. With childlike delight I marvel at how easily the stones fall out of the center of these tiny fruits (“Really from Lower Austria!” Annemarie exclaimed as she purchased them from a farm stand two days ago), having expected the battle I so frequently wage with the hearts of stubborn peaches. Now, as the pile of wedged apricots builds up in the Tupperware bowl, I pour syrup over them and thirstily drink in the tropical sunset orange that practically glows up at me.

It’s been a summer of color. Dark green, on the feathery straightness of the evergreen forest across the pasture; in the spicy, eye-watering scent of the leeks that I chop up and leave to dry on top of the stove. The pink of flowers so numerous that they splash a red hue on the hillsides as we walk up and up, through valleys and over passes, to waiting bowls of soup in the Alpine huts. Blue-black berries stain hands and clothes blood red, leave purple bruises on enamel pots and cake plates. And the greys (not really a color, I know, but to me it is the most important one): grey of the smooth, dirty cows down the road; grey of skies, a thousand greys in every cloud; grey that today reminds me that autumn approaches quickly, bringing a low and early snow to these mountains, bringing me back home to English, friends, the city, and a paucity of hours for baking.

Irmgard has come in now with a pot full of meat. I’ve asked already what it is, to which she replied, with mock defensiveness, “Ein gut fleich!” A good meat! She then jerked the raw meat away from my sight and disappeared into the pantry. Now, as she drops the pot on the hot stovetop and begins slicing vegetables, I remember the mystery of the meat.

“Was machst du?” I ask. What are you making?

Irmgard, who speaks virtually no English, replies with a long German word—or perhaps a few words—that I don’t know, and I shrug in ignorance. The question, answer, and shrug of non-comprehension are the elements of many of our conversations, especially about food.

Irmgard: Was machst du?

Me: Um… tuna melt.

Irmgard: Tunafisch?

Me: Ja… aber... melted.

Irmgard shrugs, trusting that whatever it is, it will be fine. This is the shrug I give her now. Or, rather, this is the half-shrug of my reply, for with my shoulders raised to my ears, but not yet dropped down again, I recall a familiar word in part of the long title.

“Wait,” I say. “Hase? Rabbit?”

Irmgard shakes her head, not knowing the English word.

“Hase?” I repeat (pronouncing the two syllables, HAH and seh, with teenaged insistency), putting my hands to my head and pointing two fingers at the ceiling.

She laughs and nods. “Hase!”

I glance into the pot, half expecting to see two ears, like the top of a chocolate Easter bunny, draped over the side. But there are none. No ears. No tail. Just some meat. A good meat. With a reciprocal laugh, another shrug of confidence in the rabbit’s tasty potential, I return to the pantry for butter.

Pie-making is a complicated affair here on the farm, given the lack of familiar tools. The tools are absent, I was told shortly after I arrived, because in continental Europe no one makes pie. It is apparently a strictly British inheritance, and even they seem to have mostly the small and savory variety, none of the gigantic fruit pies to which I am accustomed. “As American as apple pie,” I’m learning, is not just a phrase. And as I am spending a great deal of time here concocting desserts from the mounds of fruit grown and purchased in the fertile Austrian summer, it was inevitable that I would eventually come up against the pie problem.

Now, on my third attempt at pie, I am experienced. I know that there is neither a pie pan nor a pastry cutter. I unfold a huge block of margarine into a pile of brown and white flour. Estimating that it looks like just shy of a cup, I slice a bit more off of another block. Now is the time to cut, and I start pulling two knives—one sharp and one less so—through the flour-butter-salt. It is awkward, this kind of cutting, nothing like the pleasant childhood chore, with the pastry cutter and a bowl of mostly shortening. What it is like, actually, is my Grandma Nadine’s pie-making. Her routine with the knives on Christmas morning, preparing the pie crusts for Mom to fill with apples or pumpkin, always seemed like extra work for me, a graceful and dangerous trick she was playing to avoid the clumsiness of our newfangled gadgets. How a pastry cutter was newfangled I never understood, since I was the one that was busily chopping up the other pie crust with my own wrists and hands, working plenty hard. But now I see.

The butter and the flour, which I’m shaking to mix it up, occasionally stirring with the not-sharp knife, once in a while cutting a stray clod with the sharp one, is nearly as it should be.

And I never leave home behind when I travel. Everywhere I go, part of me is still there. Or part of there is still here with me. I’m not sure which. Because even now I am thinking about how the forest across the pasture reminds me of another forest across another pasture, one so dark and green, when we would watch each winter the line of snow creeping down and down, tree by tree, until it filled in all the way to the pasture and to us. Remembering how once I unknowingly ate rabbit, in some kind of stew prepared by a guest at our home in the mountains and, contrary to all predictable endings, I didn’t die or throw up when I found out what it was. And of course recalling, just in time, how Grandma Nadine taught me that the making of flaky, buttery pastry required nothing more than two ordinary kitchen knives.

Guttenberghaus

Sunday morning, 6:30 AM, Central European Time. I wake up hesitantly, peering through the floral curtains of my bedroom on Schiestl Farm. This is the beginning of my third week in Austria; the third week surrounded by mountains that tower over me like heads in a crowd; the third week of quietly cooking and cleaning; the third week of madly sifting through the shifting sands of vocabulary for the correct German words; the third week of writing letters and taking pictures with no people in them.

I’m waking up so early, so nervously parting the curtains, because I am supposed to go hiking this morning. Up to a church service in the mountains: Kirche am Berg. If the weather looks promising, we will go. If it’s raining, or threatening us with the violent thunderstorms that have punctuated many of our afternoons lately, we will go back to bed and wake up again at a more Sunday-appropriate hour. A great deal hangs on this weather.

The weather, actually, controls me more here than I could ever have imagined at home. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to one of my hostesses that it was easy to forget about the weather in the city, where everything important can happen under umbrellas, hoods, and roofs. “Not here!” she laughed, as we feverishly tossed hay with pitchforks in the dim, sweet darkness of a hayloft, then again glancing over our shoulders at the black clouds gathering themselves into a fierce scowl, threatening the proceedings. Here, we wake up every morning and listen to the weather report on the radio, then watch it on TV an hour later, and then read the five-day forecast in the newspaper when it comes with the mail. Weather is everything: growth, life, work, future. All in the hands of weather and—they remind me—God. “If God wants us to get the hay in, we will,” she remarks with a placid shrug. “We just need to trust.”

Curtains pulled aside, I see a mountain shrouded in fog. Unsure what this means, I plod down to the kitchen, where Annemarie is building a fire in the huge and ancient stove.

“So, what’s the deal?” I ask, curling up in a chair.

Annemarie takes a cursory glance out the window. “Looks good,” she decides. “I think we go.”

There they are, the words I have been dreading. Because I will never disagree with them, the words that urge me forward and upward and into the hills, though inwardly I am complaining and my heart is sinking. I know this hike, you see. One thousand meters elevation gain of unrelenting steepness, up and up and up, to a pass with a brown and white lodge. I’ve been there once, and though I remember it as spectacular, it is the thousand meters that I’m thinking of. I know this trail, and I know that I am tired and it’s early and that perhaps I would rather stay here, warm and dry, with a cup of coffee, and really isn’t the Sabbath supposed to be about just that? Rest?

But Annemarie said we’re going, and I have always been too proud to admit my own penchant for the sedate, so we go.

The trail is just as I remember it—grey and steep and rocky—as for a few miles we ascend through a forest and then an avalanche chute. I stare at grey pants and grey boots on grey trail under grey sky, and consider, with each breathless step, how I came to be doing this. Me, the one who as a little girl would have been mortified to list “hiking” as an interest or even an activity. I wanted to be a ballerina, then a violinist. Where did I learn this?

And the path is haunted with memories, not of the one time I have been here before, but of all the hikes, a whole life of them, the times that I have grudgingly swallowed complaint and followed someone up a hill. I think of fire lookouts in the Cascades, lingering in the panoramic views of the endless breaking waves of stone and tree. The time my parents and brother and sister climbed a small mountain near our house, bringing a stove and pancake batter and preparing crepes while the sun set. I flip back through hikes with friends, hikes with kids, hikes with Dad and me and the mountains. Yes, he was the beginning, my hiker father, shouting “Isn’t this glorious!” while I caught up to him on the trail. I followed him first.

The grey trail narrows, and we come out of the trees. We’re looking up now at a green wall, still perhaps four hundred meters below the lodge. The formidable green slope, grassy and dotted by sheep and stones, looks pathless, as if we will need to crawl, on hands and knees, straight up and to the pass. Yet the path keeps appearing, as if by magic, as we keep walking along. The path I couldn’t see from the bottom of the green slope has taken us halfway up. Now three quarters, unwinding like yarn along the emerald carpet. We never see more than a few yards of it, though. I am deep into the land of metaphor—a habit inherited from my sermon-illustrating father—before I realize it, considering the ways in which life is like this trail, never clear until it absolutely needs to be.

I’m distracted again by memories, now turning to mountaineering adventures during high school summers, again embarked upon at the urging of my dad, who coaxed me into coming with a nonchalant, “Come on, you’re not doing anything! You just finished track season! It’ll be fine.” No training for him. Just get out there, dripping with ropes and carabiners and claws for clinging to icy paths. Use your head and your ice axe, and we’ll all be OK. And I’m hopping from step to step across a glacier, following a string of lights, reviewing French history to pass dark summit-morning hours, and watching the long-awaited sunrise over row upon row of mountains dressed in ice and stone. Every summer for the last eighteen, at least, I have spent several days walking up trails, between trees, in the shade of great mountains. Sometime it became part of me.

Which part? I ask myself, as we wind back and forth across the slope, following the string of the magic trail. (The German word for this is Serpentine, I learn; so much more elegant than the English switchback, a sharp word that seems out of place in the calm silence of days in the mountains.)

The part of me, perhaps, that knows that many things in life won’t be easy—and some things won’t be fun at all—but that these things may still be good. This hike is not easy by any stretch, I think, legs aching from the walk, head aching in anticipation of the German message I will soon be trying desperately to understand. But I know that it is good. Good to be out here in the cool grey morning, looking down and back on checkered Austrian farmland, spotting the roof of the very farm where I have been living. Good to be in fellowship with believers from the other side of the world, reading the same scripture, praying the same prayers, repeating the same creed, language the only fragile barrier between us.

We reach the pass, blown by winds so strong that we can lean back into them, and turn around to face the valley. Neither easy nor consistently pleasant, this journey—like all of those others—has been stunningly beautiful and overwhelmingly good. And I am glad, now as then, that I came.

On Finishing (With Help)

It's Sunday night, and I am in my parents' basement, making a bathrobe out of an unwanted top sheet. Though this strikes me as a bizarre thing to be doing, especially squeezed into the hectic few days before I head off to Europe for most of the summer, the logic is on my side. The facts are simple, you see:

1. I don't have a bathrobe.
2. I want one.
3. I don't like this top sheet AS a top sheet.
4. It might make a fine bathrobe.
5. Years of home schooling, one sewing class in high school, and a brand new sewing machine, make me perfectly capable of making a bathrobe.

I've done most of it, actually, and I am particularly pleased with this effort. It is going smoothly, the seams fitting together and lying flat as they should. Sewing has, for me, been a particularly refreshing hobby in the past year. Unlike teaching or even writing, sewing is mostly predictable. The materials are immobile and insensible, and any disasters along the way are directly caused by my own carelessness. I have spent many hours this way during the school year, specifically in the month of December, when I watched the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy while sewing endless straight and short seams, in green and beige, creating a quilt for my sister for Christmas. This project, compared to that one, seems quick and simple.

The seeming is deceiving, however. On the eleventh step (out of fourteen), I begin to lose interest. The fabric starts to behave in a human way, taking on a stubborn personality and morphing out of the mold in which I'd cast it. It will not stay flat, nor sew straight. I sew the crooked seam until it looks terrible, and then tear it out and try again. Once again, it veers to the right, off of the fabric altogether, so that the sewing machine twists thread together in space before screaming to an angry halt.

It's too hard, I think irritably. I can't handle this. I'm tired. I leave the nearly-finished bathrobe on the table and leave the room, going to work on another project. Maybe, I think to myself, I don't need a bathrobe after all. I'll just go without. The thought of two other abandoned projects, lurking sadly in a basket at the top of my closet, gives me a moment's pause, but I don't spend too much time on it. I have other things to do, after all.

I'm leaving the country in two days. Leaving to work on a farm in Austria for six weeks. I've explained my plans so many times in the past month that they almost don't make sense to me, just words that I keep repeating, the same conversation over and over:

"So, what are your plans for the summer?" asks a colleague. "Summer school? Classes?"

"No," I reply. "I'm going to Europe."

"Wow. That's great. Where are you going?"

"Austria."

"Just Austria?" I can tell that the conversation has begun to grow odd for them. "Are you going anywhere else?"

"No... I'm actually not traveling. Well, I'm traveling to get there, you know. But it's kind of expensive to travel anywhere else. So I'm working on a farm."

"A farm?" Truly, the young teacher begins to grow stranger by the second.

"Sheep farm. Bed and breakfast. Up in the Alps."

The conversation then veers in different directions depending on who's asking. From my teaching colleagues, I usually hear a "Do it while you're young!" From my friends come more questions. Do I know this place? Why am I doing this? To my Christian friends, I continue to explain my quest for emotional, mental, and spiritual restoration. I cite my need for rest after a challenging, wearying year. I assert that working, on a sheep farm, will be restful. And I hope it will.

Today, I've told someone that I am going to Austria to listen. To God, mostly. How vital that listening seems now, as I reflect on a noisy year. I remember times that I chose to listen, and times that I didn't want to hear. If I can hear Him first, won't the rest follow? So hard, though, to explain this need to hear in such a brief conversation, especially as I suspect that the connection between listening and farm chores makes sense only to me.

I am distracted from my project (itself a distraction from sewing) by the return of my parents from church. I come into the family room, where the paraphernalia of an abandoned sewing project still festoon the couch and ironing board.

"How's this going?" my mother asks innocently.

"Bad," I sniff. "Nothing's right. The fabric is being... just wicked. I can't make it right."

"Hm," she replies, picking it up the half-done seam. "It's good. You've done a good job. It's just not done."

"No."

"Mind if I try?" she asks. I don't mind much. I'm weighing the value of doing this "all on my own" against the value of accepting help. Help wins today.

Ten minutes later, I return to the sewing machine, where she has magically charmed the slippery fabric into shape. I get out some of the remaining pieces and sit down.

"Let me," she says. "You rest. I'll do it."

So I sit back and watch as my mother, with her twenty-six more years of experience, finishes for me. It's not triumphant, I think, but it's real. Sometimes I am tired--I imagine everyone is. I think of the people, in the last year, who have helped me finish things. The kind words that redeemed lonely days. The peace and quiet that sweetened weary mornings. The friends who encouraged. The family who loved. That help, often unexpected, that brought me here.

It's not done all on my own, but if I have discovered anything this year, it is the glory to be found in unlooked for goodness, blessings I have stumbled upon when I was tired and ready to give up.

Closing Time

Life's hall of darkness
Reveals light as my mind opens
Insight awaits me still

-A haiku from Period Five

The floors of Room 120 no longer gleam. There is a patch of red soda that someone spilled during yesterday's party, while we ate junk food and watched She's the Man and felt brilliant as we recognized the names and places from Twelfth Night, which we finished reading last week. "This is one of my favorite ways to feel smart," I told them. "When I am watching a movie and someone makes a reference to something else and I know what it's about. I feel so educated and brilliant. And you will, too. This isn't just a high school movie. Watch!"

Watch we did. On some level my speech was as much a justification to myself as a pep talk for them, giving me license play the "movie card" on the last day of school. But it was a cloudy, cold June day, and we were tired. So we ate chips and cookies and drank soda and laughed together at a ridiculous movie. Somewhere in there, cups of juice were dropped, crumbs fell, and rubber dirt from the soccer feild got stuck in the sugary puddles. The light coming in through the window now, as I sweep the floor and listen to music, does not bounce up from tan linoleum, but pauses and lingers in the matte dirtiness. The year has taken its toll on all of us, even the floor.

A student is now sitting across the classroom from me, the lone last student who made good on his promise to come in and finish his poetry project. I had no idea, when I welcomed him in, that he would be completing the entire thing now--it was supposed to be done and ready to hand in when he walked through the door--but he sits calmly and quietly writing poems in the corner, keeping me here.

My obligations are complete, you see. The grades were the first task on the list today, entered with weary and careful precision early in the morning. I am glad to be done with them, glad not to see, anymore, the triumphs and failures in which I feel complicit with my students.

Then the cleaning. Other than the floors, the classroom is as clean as it's been all year, the desks returned to their regimented rows and columns, the bulletin boards, whiteboards, chalkboards empty and waiting. I've hung the remains of student art on the wall, smiling to remember the ones who put it there, the students who will not be coming back to me in the fall. On my cleared-off desk sits a plant a student gave me yesterday. Its pink flowers perplexed me until the student reminded me that her hair had been that color for the majority of her time in class. Now I see her each moment my eyes rest on the electric pink petals.

The letters come last. They were the last true assignment my students completed for me, after their final presentations but before the mind-vacation of movie and junk-food Tuesday. I asked them to write me a letter about the year, sharing favorite memories, lessons learned, and advice for me as their teacher. There were endless complaints about these letters: "Why are you making us WORK today? School is OVER! How DARE you!" My responses grew less graceful as the day wore on:

Period One: "You need to write because school is not over until Tuesday."

Period Two: "It'll be good for you. Reflection, you know."

Period Three: "Seriously? It's just a little letter! Do a good job!"

Period Five: "Come on, folks. Settle down. We will not be watching a movie until you finish this."

Period Six: "I ask so little. A letter. That's it. Just write it. Stop being lame."

I am a little apprehensive as I begin to read, afraid that my irritability on the second-to-last day of school will have spilled into their impressions of the whole year.

The stories I read here! Of the nerves of the first day of school, of friendships lost and found, of after-school band practices and the comfort of a few oragami balloons and Christmas lights. They reference short stories we read so long ago that I've almost forgotten them. I see myself, again and again, reflected in their words, the young and quiet teacher in the loud and beautiful classroom. An odd and many-faced mirror.

"Whether it was loud or not you always found a way to make class fun. You managed to teach a lot of information to us through all of the talking and noise."

"I was very shy on the first day of school but now I'm free as a barn swallow."

"Sometimes in the morning I used to hear your voice say 'Don't be late' or 'You need to come to school more, your grade is bad.'"

To borrow one of my father's favorite metaphors, this has been a climbing year. There have been the seemingly endless uphill battles, when the summit is nowhere in sight and the trail is overgrown. The days when the broken lives and dreadful decisions of my students threatened any hopes for their future. There have been steep climbs, days when I left hoping that something miraculous (like an ice storm) would prevent my return the next morning. But I have emerged from the forest at unlikely places, privileged to see a little beauty--views of friendship or growth or courage. I have rested in cool and quiet forests, comforted by the funny and raucous community of lunch and the calm mornings with gentle, sleepy teenagers. Today, I've reached the pass. Some of the fog has lifted, briefly from where I've been, and I can peer dimly into the future, still golden and unknown.

And just like climbing, when I forget about the blisters, burns, and bent toes in the ecstacy of completion, I will be back. After a rest, of course. As one of my students writes to me, "I experienced a lot and want to continue this journey." I couldn't agree more.