The almanac and my classroom garden

I wish I could schedule my lesson plans according to the garden guide in Blum's Almanac.

Planting--starting a project,
prune to encourage growth-- revising a paper,
weeding-- giving feedback,
harvesting-- presenting projects,
and so on.

Sometimes it is possible to align the school calendar with the almanac, but as with every endeavor there are hindrances.

Sybil

Sybil is a prophet, but tonight she has been remaindered. I'm more disappointed than I was when Little Nell died. Sybil has fallen victim to the Cold Mountain effect, wherein the mother dies in childbirth but the child survives as a symbol (sybil symbol) of love requited but cut short. Lots of tears but not much movement forward.

Hairballs

Our youngest, smallest cat weighs less than 8 pounds at 2 years old. She is athletic and affectionate. Even her hairballs are cute and petite as she is.

A day on the water

Kayaking today from downtown Cedar Keys to Seahorse Key. Loon, bufflehead, pied billed grebe, brown pelican, dolphin, jellyfish, common tern, black skimmer. Then a full moon on the way home.

Whitman and Blanco

Richard Blanco's inaugural poem went out of the ball park, and it made me think of Walt Whitman. I haven't heard anyone say it. I was watching PBS during the inauguration this morning. I thought, maybe David Brooks and Mark Shields will say-- wow, that poem really evoked Walt Whitman here on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's speech on the mall, and all those other anniversaries-- but they didn't. Walt Whitman somehow managed to get the whole country into a poem. He did it in "The Sleepers." He did it in "I Hear America Singing." He saw the diversity around him before diversity was a word.

I had so many things I needed to be doing, but instead I just sat with a cat in my lap and watched the ceremony unfold. The cameras showed the faces of the crowd, especially when the singers performed. The people were so proud of those high notes.

It takes a lot of patience to listen to a poem, without seeing it on the page, and I saw the patience in the President's face. He understood what Blanco was doing. He heard that poem. He wasn't just laying attention on his face. It was a good poem.

Trapped 2

Here is the full story on the closet incident which happened a few days ago. On Wednesday evening, I was putting together my outfit for the next day's special occasion at school. Behind the closed closet doors I was rummaging through boxes of shoes and hanging dresses. These rustling sounds were driving the younger cats wild. I could hear them outside the closet chirping and really wanting to get in.

The closet doors are two sliding mirrors on tracks. When we moved in nine years ago, the cats were fascinated by the closet. They liked to break in and hide among the shoe boxes. I cut two dowel rods to size and put them in the tracks to keep the doors from being pried open. We can easily kick the stick out of the way and get in, but the cats didn't know how to move the sticks. We had stopped needing to block the doors several years ago, but then Daisy came and the closet was breached again. She jumped on all the shelves and tossed off jewelry boxes and sweaters. She opened the bottom drawer of the chest and pulled my pajamas out onto the floor. I foraged in the back of the closet and found the old sticks and deployed them in the tracks.

Wednesday night as I was going through boxes of shoes, I could hear Nick and Daisy scuffling outside the closet. In the commotion, they must have knocked the stick back up onto the track. When I was ready to exit the closet, the door wouldn't budge. Thinking quickly, I realized that my husband was downstairs and could release me from the closet, but he had the TV on and wouldn't hear me easily from upstairs. I opened the laundry trapdoor in the corner of the closet and called his name. After calling about four times, I knocked on the floor, and that got his attention. We were both laughing as he moved the stick and set me free.

We speculated about the sound of a cat laughing up its pajama sleeves.

If the cats trap me in the closet again, all is not lost if I am at home alone. I could have gotten out of the less used if the two doors easily from the inside.

Invasive

I spent the morning digging up the invasive plant ardisia crenata in the woods behind the back yard. A web search for invasive bushes in Florida turns up some interesting images of politicians. Better to use the term "plant" when looking for ardisia and nandina.

Trapped

Funny story, yesterday, the kitties kicked a stick and I was trapped in the closet for 3 minutes.

Thanks 3

Recently I have read several writers' response to the question, what was the last book that made you cry?

Not a book. A journalist's report.

About a week ago, the students of Sandyhook Elementary went back to class. Their teachers refitted a middle school to the closest possible replica of their learning environment. Classroom decorations, artwork from their recent projects, all transposed to the new school.

That part of the article alone was enough to pull me in. The crisis point of my experience as a reader came when the journalist explained that, in addition to signs along the road, therapy dogs were enlisted to greet them when their school buses arrived at the new location. Therapy dogs. I envisioned their tails wagging, tongues licking, eyes bright with enthusiasm for children they were meeting for the first time. My throat clutched. It was the story for which I was yearning.

Someone told me recently, as I went back to work after the winter break ... you dote on your students. What the teachers at Sandyhook Elementary did for their students went beyond doting and celebration.

It was so much more than writing a letter of recommendation for colleges and universities unknown.

Out of all the letters I write for seniors, maybe one fifth tell me the outcome of their efforts and mine. Most of them just fade away.

Thank you 2

Thank you to the friends of my father who wished to honor the friendship with a generous gesture. Your families thought otherwise. It is not just the thought that counts. It is the friendship that counts and anything else is symbolic.

Thank you

I would like to thank the person who carried my scarf from the parking lot to the customer service desk in the Publix at NW 39th Avenue and I-75 on Friday afternoon. I put my jacket on to dash into the store for cough syrup, and did not realize until I got home that my scarf was not in the car. I called the store just on the off chance that some nice person had turned in my scarf to the lost and found. The young woman who answered the phone said, "Is it black and tan with checks and blue?" I told her my name and she said I could pick it up the next time I came in.

This act of kindness brought the roller coaster to a safe stop for a while. It came at the end of a day when I had found out that a colleague of mine, with whom I shared masses of teaching materials representing hundreds of hours of preparation, had given copies of my tests to the students. I was still puzzling over that thoughtless act when the scarf episode came along to erase the glum feeling.

Along the way to retrieve the scarf yesterday, my husband and I got caught in a traffic jam caused by a trailer of bulls that crashed on the interstate. It has been a weekend of mishaps, and I am grateful that, this time, only inconvenience came from my own carelessness.

Mucus

If I were a snail, or if I just took time to think carefully, I would have a greater appreciation of mucus and be more tolerant of it when I catch a cold. Mucus shields the body from so much harm, even against itself, as when mucus protects the throat and stomach from powerful acids that aid the digestive process.

This recent cold restarted the sneezy faucet stage all over again when it should have moved on to the thick and chewy stage instead. Saltwater rinse did not have as much power to ease symptoms this time around. The low point was on the airplane coming back from Boston, when I could not stop sneezing and the lady seated next to me dumped her cracker crumbs all over me and my laptop keyboard. Finally, however, the mucus production is beginning to slow to a crawl.

The end of the road less taken

The second and last year of writing more than twenty letters of recommendation for my students has ended. There will not be another year like this, where I have taught some of them for three years.

I can't describe my feelings of gratitude and fatigue as I finish the last letters.