This is the spot:—how mildly does the sun Shine in between the fading leaves! the air In the habitual silence of this wood Is more than silent: and this bed of heath, Where shall we find so sweet a resting-place? William Wordsworth, from “Traveling” I walked the woods for months, looking for it. In the…
Author: Kristi
Teacher. Writer. Traveler. Learning to see God everywhere.
Places as People
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses amid…
A Million Right Turns
“I don’t get attached until after it’s trimmed,” my classmate tells me, looking up with apprehension from the pottery wheel across from me, where she’s just finished shaping a tiny cup. It’s seventh period in the ceramics room, where I spend the ends of most days taking Ceramics 3 as a student. Though I’ve taken…
Walking Towards Waterfalls
The trail turns steeply upward once we’ve left the road. We’ve been walking along a creek in Lenk, Switzerland for a while, carefully skirting the edges of the path to avoid marring the smooth grooves of the langlauf, or cross-county skiing tracks. Now, the signs take us off the wide, flat track, into deep snow…
Professionally Curious
I’m walking in circles these days, dizzy spirals around the library under the rounded hangar ceiling of our school. Once in a while I’ll pause by a computer and a student, stopping to give advice or ask a question, but most often its a leisurely drift, digital eavesdropping on the eleventh-graders as they start their research…
Gluten & Gatsby
‘Tis the night before “school Valentine’s Day”–known by everyone else as Friday, or to the superstitious as Friday the 13th–and I’m baking cookies. Everyone, it seems, needs cookies tomorrow. There are some for my sixth period class, a tiny collection of eight students who managed to hold the best debate on whether Gatsby truly loved…
End Zones & Time Zones
I was seventeen the first time I watched the Super Bowl all the way through. I’m sure it was on other years, but I could never be bothered to watch. I’d float in for the halftime show or a few commercials. The game itself felt endless, piles of people crawling across the field, lacking the…
Days on Days
“Snow is falling, snow on snow…” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” Christina Rosetti It’s been snowing for two hours in Kandern. Apparently, two hours of steady snow is all it takes to transform the town from dingy winter to snowglobe splendor. It wasn’t promising when it began, this storm, just a few errant flakes escaping the…
The Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till…
Things That Made Life Better This Year: 2014 Edition
A frigid New Years’ Day, and I’m sitting by our front window, watching the sun set over the leafless hills that stand between the evergreen Black Forest and the vineyard-striped Rhine River Valley. A post-Christmas storm has left our town icy cold and snow-covered, so we’re enjoying these glowing pink and blue days before the…
The Way Home 