Wintry Mix Up

Wintry Mix Up

Living in New England

I should have known better

than hope that crocus teeth

cutting through dead leaves

and melting snow

meant an end of winter.

As baseball begins again

I should have remembered

sitting in the grandstand

wrapped in blankets

or a long ago April blizzard

that brought down branches.

A week and a half

past the vernal equinox

fat flakes turn to clicking sleet

then to rain

and back again.

Yes, now I remember.

Mariposas

If beauty is truth,

what can be said

of the the blue morpho

who closes its brilliance

into camouflage

as  it stops to gather nectar?

Or what of the green malachite
seen only in peripheral vision

as it flies fast

over concertina wire

taking its glory

out into the black night?

Or the absent orange monarch

once plentiful in the hydrangea?

If truth is beauty

what am I to learn from these?

that beauty is a transitory thing?

that the truth cannot be held?

that there is honesty in butterflies?

Lingering Music

"...our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit's need to be. It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music that, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult to hear it as music."

Christian Wiman My Bright Abyss

I am never sure I understand exactly what Wiman is talking about, but what I do get is rich and feeds me for a long time. That may be why it's taking me months to read this book. Every phrase, every sentence makes me stop, read it again, and then ponder it. Very rich and very good!

This particular quotation struck a chord (excuse the pun) with me when he talks about all the things that clutter up life, preventing us from hearing that "strange, complicated music." Returning from Nicaragua, most of our team have said that we return with many questions. What we saw and experienced is like a strange and complicated symphony--full of lovely melodies and disturbing discords.

Now we are back to work, to school, to the regular patterns of our life--patterns that can seem to drown out that other music. But not quite. The roosters are still crowing in Las Mercedes. The school children are still shuffling into their seats at NITCA. The iron gates are still clanking closed at Hansae,

And we are here in the last days of winter, looking forward to spring, but the strange music of Nicaragua still rings in our ears. Let us hope that we keep hearing those notes of beauty and oppression and that someday we hear more clearly the healing harmonies.

Remembering my Father on his Birthday

Stargazing

My father bought me stars,

a small constellation

splayed across wax paper,

picked from a wooden bin

between clothesline and fuses

at Carpenter and Webber’s Hardware.

One by one

he pasted them

on the ceiling above my bed.

“Leave the shades up today,

then when it’s nighttime,

the stars will come out.”

At 7:30 the Lone Ranger

began his fight for law and order

on the white Crosley

next to my bed,

where I lay safe

beneath my very own galaxy.

A Bit of Purple Hope

A friend told me last night that she saw a crocus popping up. God, I love those beauties. They are so defiant. They will not let this winter, any winter, keep them down.

Right now it's 10 degrees out, and my yard has snow banks three feet high, and it's March 5 already! I can pound my mittened fists and say it's time for spring, but being a true New Englander, I know springtime is a variable concept.

But those crocuses don't care. They shoot up through the snow and give us a glimmer of hope, just enough to get us through another frigid day.

Polylingual

The dog is asking me a question

and I have no answer.

Pablo Neruda

So, Pablo,

your Spanish answers

are as insufficient as

my English ones

to that ever so quiet grrr,

that insistent bark,

that quizzical look

that asks--what?

I do not know.

Not knowing

does not stop me

from answering.

I am, after all,

the superior brain.

I am master,

and he is only

dog--

a dog who hears

and understands all

then responds

with indiscriminate love.

The Gift of Reading

As frequently happens when I’m reading Facebook posts, I clicked on a link and traveled off in a whole new direction. A teacher friend posted a link to Terry Heick’s article “Why Students Hate Reading–And Often Aren’t Very Good At It” on teachthought.com. Heick points out that in our fast-paced Instagram world, students are not encouraged to connect at a deeper level with the people and situations they are reading about. I heartily agree. By emphasizing reading as a decoding process, by breaking it into its parts of main idea and details, students are not able to stop and reflect on how the lives in the story connect to their lives.

His article caused me to reflect on how I came to love reading. How was I, a middle-class white girl raised in a stable two-parent home, able to empathize with Huck Finn's being abused by his drunken father or with Helen Keller's struggle to communicate despite being blind and deaf?  These were not my experiences, yet as I read these stories, I was able to imagine myself in their shoes. Clearly these were well-written stories, but there's more to it.

My love of reading has a lot to do with the people who loved me enough to read to me. Night after night either my mother or father would snuggle up next to me and read from one of my favorite books. There were books of poetry as well as stories. I requested some poems, like Rachel Field's "General Store," so often that I began to recite them on my own. Then there was

Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm which I inscribed with my name and this succinct review, "This is a very funny book." How could it not be considering it had characters named Fetlock Harroway, Freda Workbasket , and Crystal Mallett, not to mention a cow named Arbutus and a horse named Trotsky (Hmm, a Cold War message here?).

These people who loved me more than anyone else on earth wanted to share reading with me, and by doing so, they showed me how I could connect with mere words on a page. Then when I was in fifth grade I had a wonderful teacher--Mrs. LeBel. She was exceptional for many reasons, but, not the least of them, was that she read to us. For years I've been trying to remember the name of the book about two orphan girls that she read to us a chapter at a time. Today, thanks to Google and Amazon, I have a copy of Nancy and Plum wending its way to me, and, ironically, I discovered it was also written by Betty MacDonald.

Had Mrs. LeBel presented MacDonald's words as tools, or had she asked us to strategize how to understand the story, I am sure that experience would not have stayed with me these 60 years. Instead, we stopped whatever we were doing, and she shared with us not only the story, but her time and her love of reading. What a gift!