Starbucks vanilla lattes taste the same, everywhere and always. With one sip of sweet, hot, vaguely coffee-flavored milk, I could be fourteen and trying coffee for the first time, or twenty and drinking my first latte of my shift at 5:30 AM as the sun rises. It doesn’t matter that ten years have passed, or…
Category: Life
Long Distance
I’m sitting out in the long-expected sunshine, a stack of Honors American Literature exams on my lap. I’m reading them, marking them, but slowly. I keep getting distracted. A senior is heading off to Scotland in the fall, and he perches on a bench long enough to talk about summer jobs in America and the…
Word Choice
Me: Do you want to play a game at the end of class? Students: Is it a vocabulary game? Me: Of course it is. Let’s be honest, pretty much all my games are vocabulary games. We’ve been working on college essays for a while now in eleventh grade American Literature class. It’s a useful way to…
Entangling Details, Words of Worth
Wednesday afternoon, I’m missing track practice to finish up final details for Friday’s Junior-Senior Banquet. It has traditionally been the responsibility of the junior class to fundraise and then plan this event, BFA’s version of prom. (And by “junior class,” I mean about a third of the juniors, two endlessly hardworking class officers and ten…
We Didn’t Always Live in Kandern
As often happens, I have words stuck in my head. These ones aren’t the common song lyrics, though. I’m the only person I know who is haunted by lines of prose. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street.” Those used to be first words I read to my students, back at Ingraham, nine thousand miles…
On Surprises
We’re sitting in a rectangle of desks on Friday afternoon, ready for Round Two of poetry presentations in American Literature class. Yesterday, the class was a showcase of teenaged creativity. I’ve arranged their projects on the low bookshelf that runs along the back of the room: a model village to illustrate E.E. Cummings’s “anyone lived…
Home is Wherever I’m With You
Brother Tom nodded understandingly. “It’s the memories, the old loyalties; they are so precious,” he said. “Things that meant so much, that stay present in the wood and stone of a place. If you let go of the place and the things that belong to it, you feel afraid that you’ll lose hold of the…
Marble Cake and Maugenhard
“Well, you should probably just make a dessert. Any kind of dessert, for Sunday night,” the Maugenhard RA tells me after a supper of spaghetti, during which we watched snow fall outside on the not-yet-green hills of the Black Forest. Spring is delayed this year, after what’s been called “the darkest winter in 43 years.”…
A Ring and a Question, A Kiss and a Prayer
Meet me where you’re going, Cause I want to be going where you are. Teach me what you’re knowing, Cause I want to be knowing who you are. “Meet Me Where You’re Going,” Cloud Cult For the seventh time, I return to the candle. It is alone between a road and a wide, snowy field,…
Winter Warmth
And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold…
The Way Home 