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.