Be n Love With Yr Life-- Dec. 1st until Solstice

I love walking home in twilight, under a wide, high cloud sky, watching all of the lights come on in and around houses.

Be in love with your life:

Teaching Green Club how to write an email to an elected official, using Sara Acres Gelser Blouin as my source.

Be in love with yr life: latkes cooked in saflower oil for extra crispy Ness.

Be in love with yr life: local veg for dinner. Beans, carrots, onion, celery, tomatoes, cornmeal, and, yes, garden zucchini.

Be in love with yr life: Some cold, damp days, Mr Beezhold decides that, really, the hutch is the best place to be. Especially if there is an apple quartered just for him in there.

Be in love with yr life: Therapy hand putty. After two broken arms in four years, I have not one, not two, but three containers of it. They sit on my desk at school. Every day, in every class, a couple of kids snag them, roll long logs, create spirals, shape ramps for hot wheels, make art, and just fondle the stuff during class. And then, it comes back to my desk for the next round.

Be in love with yr life: Watching the Forestry class take out the bushy, falling over into the garden trees that will be replaced by a Fall Fruit Orchard in the CHS garden.

Be in love with yr life:

It is raining outside, cold, dark rain. Inside, the twinkle lights dispel the gloom, bean plants line the windows, ninth graders are bent over papers and chromebooks, encountering Alan Ginsberg and the Witicha Vortex Sutra. The task begins with looking up five people Ginsberg calls upon to help him. This is a bit of a teacher dilemma....one person he calls upon for help appears on Wikipedia naked and covered in ashes. Do I call attention to him by telling the students to not go there? Do I remind them to Be Mature? Or do I figure, with at least twenty people to choose from the odds are low that someone will stumble across him?

We are about 15 minutes into the task when four girls gasp, laugh in delight and horror, and slide to the floor. They found him.

Be in love with yr life: HOT WATER! Mark is taking a shower.

Be in Love with yr Life: Lucia Day in the rain...cocoa, buns, a dog, and brave friends who gather despite the weather.

Be in Love with yr Life: I live with a Stud Muffin in a sweater vest, who wanders around creating vocal bass riffs on funky songs from the 1970s.

Be in Love with yr Life: if you make one pie shell, you might as well make two, and use up the cherries in the freezer.

Be in Love with yr Life: browsing the public library.

Be in Love with yr life: walking to the end of the street to buy our tree from the boy scouts and walking it home.

Be in Love with yr Life: Yule begins on the afternoon that student interactions end.

Be in Love with yr Life: Chard on a sunny Friday afternoon. And then, we went for a walk. Snow covered Cascade mountains against the high clouds and almost full moon rise while the sun went down. We live in a beautiful world.

Be in Love with yr Life: Saturday...Kayli has brought in 78 twigs since November 18th.

Sunday: newspapers, tea, toast, and birds on the feeder outside the window.

Be in Love with yr Life: The moment when the City recorder pauses, then says, "All councilors present" and the meeting begins. I love democracy.

Be in Love with yr Life: The Light begins to return on Tuesday.

8Laurie Kaptur Chaplen, Stewart Wershow and 6 others

Laundry

                 Laundry was my first real household chore, beyond feeding the dog, washing the dishes, and keeping my own room in order.  It became mine when my mother opened her hair dressing salon, which brought in several loads of small white towels every week. For about six months, I rolled an old fashioned grocery cart down the road to the Laundromat and sat for several hours with a book while the machines churned away at the five loads. I loved it. I could read or people watch. But, as the towel piles grew, we needed a new system. My mother bought a dryer, which she set up in her bedroom, and an ancient wringer washing machine. The thing was dangerous! If you were not careful with the wringer, buttons went flying and there were rumors of smashed fingers. But there was a rhythm to the process—hot water for washing whites, followed by colored clothes because the water had cooled, then a rinse cycle where I reloaded the whites, then the colored, followed by washing the really dirty work clothes in the rinse water.  I hauled the sheets and our clothes out to the lines and devised ways to fold sheets neatly while still hanging up. It was an adult accomplishment.

                When we moved into our house, there were two sets of washers and dryers—one installed in the basement and one stored in the garage. We hauled the garage set away. The basement washer was avocado green, solid as a rock, and huge. I caught the greywater in a 55 gallon drum and pumped it up to water my newly established perennials and I had to watch it closely if I did more than two loads. When it finally died, we replaced it with a very efficient front loader which used half the water and worked about half as well on really dirty clothes. The dryer was from the 1950s. When a part burned out, Mark replaced it. When it happened again a couple of months later, we bought another wooden drying rack and unplugged it forever. It was hauled away with the avocado green washer.

                Having just a washer, no dryer, has worked well for us. For long stretches of the year, we can hang everything out. In winter, we use the drying racks and the rafters over the wood stove in the dining room.  We held onto sheets and towels, doing huge loads on the mid-winter days when it is bright and sunny. If they did not appear, Mark hauled the sheets down to the laundromat at the end of the street and did a massive wash and dry. He brought a book, read, and enjoyed the time. We ran loads of laundry at the same time as house cleaning, once a week.

                A few months ago, the washer died for the third time. Last time, the repairman had to dig the part out from a dark corner of his van, because the model is now obsolete. “I don’t know if we can fix it again,” he muttered to Mark. Neither of them were happy with the thought. “It’s not that old,” we complained. Because it died on a Saturday morning and we needed clean underwear, Mark loaded up the laundry duffel and rode the load down the street. He came back less than an hour later, quite chirked up. The new remodel they completed during the pandemic was great, he reported. New, big machines, that were highly efficient. The spin cycle pulled almost all of the water out of our clothes, even better than our machine downstairs. It was like….Denmark. We hung up the clothes. He was right. They dried faster. Why buy a new washer?

                And so, here we are, full circle, back at the laundromat. We still hang our stuff up at home, but the washers are great and our clothes are cleaner. Is it, overall, more energy efficient? We are using a communal machine, rather than replacing our own. That counts for a lot. The water heater there has to be better than ours. We are using less water. When we dry the sheets, it is faster and the heat from the machine heats the building, not the outside air. And it is faster—all of the wash is done at once, in 47 minutes, rather than over the course of the morning. We could do the calculations, but, so far, it is working.

Thanks

 

November, the time for bringing in the harvest and giving thanks for making through another year with provisions for the winter. And I have been thankful, lately, in many aspects of my life. More to come, each day this week.

1.       I am deeply thankful to be able to browse the public library once again, to haul home a stack of books that I stumble upon while wandering through the stacks. I will never take browsing for granted again.

2.       I am thankful for ninth graders who are returning to “normal” after a year and a half of fear, restraint, and silence. They are sharing cookies before class, laughing at each other’s jokes, and rocking pink powderpuff football shirts.

3.      

I am, as always, thankful for the people who grow our food—beans and grains, winter greens and squashes.

4.       I am thankful for leaves and cornstalks which pile onto my garden beds and become living soil by spring planting time.

 

Leaf Moving

  

              Last weekend was glorious—dry, sunny, and bright. When I came home from school of Friday afternoon, after two hours on the Spartan Garden blackberry bramble, our neighbor had lined up all of his leaves from the linden trees in a neat windrow along the road. Leaf Time! We gathered our tools—wheelbarrow, shovel, rake—and began moving leaves until dark. The next morning, we looked at the leaf pile, the back yard, and the housework list. I crossed off everything inside and we moved outward. Mark shifted leaves. I cleaned out beds. He chopped up compost. I pruned grape vines. Then we ate lunch and went back outside. Right before dark, we washed and hung the last storm window. The yard and garden were snug for the winter. The next day, we went for a long walk at Finley Wildlife Refuge, basking in the late fall sun while eating a picnic. We watched white swans take off against the blue sky when a coyote crept up on them. In the late afternoon, we carved our pumpkins to protect the house and gardens on Halloween night, then came inside for lasagna and apple pie by the fire. It was a lovely weekend.

 

               This weekend, the clouds have come in, so we did all of the housecleaning we avoided last week. Mark cleaned out the fridge. I washed the floors. We folded the last of the laundry drying in the living room, put away all of the small objects that tend to float towards the bench in the living room, and watered all of the plants.  The house is clean and tidy. Tonight, we may have another fire and smores while we read The Economist and begin knitting the purple sweater vest I have been planning to clear out my yarn stash. Winter is coming.

The Second Coming

      

          I have been haunted by “The Second Coming,” written by William Butler Yeats at the beginning of the last century, for a week. In so many ways, it feels, “the centre cannot hold” in 2021. Politically, the gyre widens every day—we have lost the sense that we are all pulling for the same ideals, even if we do not agree on the paths to get there. The worse are full of passionate intensity, the centre is missing. The climate crisis continues to grow. The pandemic is not over; we have not begun to reckon with the fall out economically or socially while we argue over masks and vaccinations. The words I hear at school echo this falling apart—students cannot regulate themselves, children are feral after two years at home, away from the order of the classroom. Mere anarchy.

                 This afternoon, I left the house, stepping into a wild and windy afternoon. There had been one downpour. Clouds suggested that another might be on the way. I tucked my poncho into my bag. The sky was huge and grey, ocean driven clouds. The streets were slippery with fallen leaves. It all swirled around me as I began to walk, caught up in the whirling world, my mind matching the air around me. Then, the walk settled in. The rhythm of my steps, matching the beat of my heart. My mind followed my feet, settling down. Where is my center—the center I can hold onto? My feet. The earth. The cycle of the seasons, thinking about how the leaves flying around my head would soon settle onto my garden beds, break down, become next season’s greens and tomatoes.  How do I bring this center into the widening gyre of the world, as I am called to do, every day, in the classroom? Because the poem shifts, in the second stanza, towards a Second Coming, perhaps, out of all of this violence, a second chance to do thing correctly, to have a second birth in Bethlehem, a second savior that just might, this time, pull the world out of chaos? Surely, something good must come out of this?

     Yeats, like me, is not sure—the monster, slouching towards us, feels pitiless and violent, hot and dry as the sun or a wildfire. Darkness follows it. Hope is not a guarantee. It was not in 1919. For those of us trying to hold the center, on the front lines of this anarchy, it is not in 2021.

 

Be kind.

 

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

Classroom Numbers

 

I have been trying to figure out how to explain or describe the amount of extra energy my job is taking this year. This is one class, by the numbers. They don’t really like to read or write the assigned work, although one loves to write confessional poetry and they all love to read text messages on their phones, but that’s not reading. There are about 21 kids in class.

·         1 kid who wafted through before class, to check out the vibe, so that he might come to class at some unknown time.

·         2 kids who needed to discuss plans to deal with stress if they need to leave class because of an incident on Friday.

·         Several girls peacefully eating breakfast—juice and a sticky roll.

·         1 student in a lovely velour jacket, who decided to come to class for the first time in two weeks. He had read ahead, so it could be worse.

·         1 student who is being observed by admin because of anger issues in class. He left for a long pep talk in the hall.

·         2 kids whose masks “slip off” their noses all the time, but who put them back up if I look at them.

·         2 or 3 kids who like the mask beard look and argue about masks.

·         1 couple who like to sit very close together—I told them last week they cannot hold hands in class.

·         2 kids feeling guilty about being butts on Friday.

·         2 kids NOT feeling guilty at all about Friday.

·         2 kids who have to leave class because of anxiety—one who talked to me before class, the other who talked to me weeks ago.

·         2 kids who have to slip out for medication during class. They are subtle.

·         1 kid who shows up with his mother an hour into class. Mom has no pass, so I send her back downstairs. Really, we should not have any one in the school right now.

·         1 mom who come back with the principal, who proceeds to lurk outside my room for the last twenty minutes of class.

Not all of my classes are this weird, but all of my classes have very high levels of anxiety, low turn in rates, and an underlying feeling of tension as well as exhaustion. We shine some days, but it is hard.

Council Shawls

         

I have a confession—I have been knitting during council meetings for months now. I started when we were receiving Covid updates at the beginning of the pandemic, because we were off camera and no one could see that I was working away on my sweater jacket under my desk. When we came back on camera I was good for a while, just doodling on my notes, but….my new shawl was calling to be finished and I wanted to see how the final design would emerge; I broke it out at a work session.  We were looking at slides, which are always too small for me to read anyways, so….

I have finished two shawls.

I have long known that knitting, doodling, playing with the putty they give you to strengthen your hands after an injury, all helps people focus. I have never stopped a student from knitting in class—we have gone through several cycles in my years at CHS—and have occasionally helped out with a dropped or a weird stitch. One common beginner mistake is still named after Thomas, who was working on a scarf for his girlfriend in class for several weeks. I also know that Eleanor Roosevelt, a model of political productivity if there ever was one, knit blankets during long meetings. So, why should I hold back? Hauling wool, needles, and pattern down to Council Chambers along with a big packet could be daunting, but I am at home. Who would know?

And that is what I thought for several months. If you were not watching me every moment, you would not see the occasional long arm reach to free a tangle of yarn or the shawl emerging from under my desk to settle the needles. And then I saw a screen shot of council one night. Everyone else is scowling at their second monitor, trying to read the slides. But there I am, serenely working under the desk, Knit Faced, just listening. You can tell.

I have finished my second shawl now. I have a third planned, but then….if three skeins of Brown Sheep yarn landed on my doorstep, you too could have a Council Knit shawl.