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.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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.
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.
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