{The Love Song Of} 2 & 33

  I owe a lot to T.S. Eliot and Taylor Swift for these lines, composed on a walk today with Luci. I’m emulating another favorite, Billy Collins, master of the birthday poem. It was a poetic day, rich and splendid, worth sharing.   Let us go then, you and me, where the autumn blazes bright…

Read More

Angelina & The Lupine Lady

“That is all very well, little Alice,” said her grandfather, “but there is a third thing you must do.” “What is that?” asked Alice. “You must do something to make the world more beautiful,” said her grandfather. “All right,” said Alice. But she did not know what that could be. In the meantime Alice got…

Read More

To Inform & Entertain: Inside a School Newspaper

Effects of both Hurricanes in the US Protests in France>> labour reforms and worker’s rights North Korea SHORT election follow-up Healthcare in US Iran Deal Net Neutrality DRM being added to HTML standardization Healthcare Kneeling nat’l anthem 500 anniversary reformation Earthquakes Climate Change (hurricanes, wildfires) Refugee crisis: What is it? Why? BFA Chronicle October world news…

Read More

The {Not Terribly} Simple Life

Friday I come home for lunch. More precisely, I leave school shortly before lunch, to pick Luci up from friends’ house, where she’s spent the morning playing with twin two-year-old boys. These boys spend another weekday at our house, where Timmy runs a three-toddler circus with extraordinary energy and humor. Whenever she’s going to spend…

Read More

The Summer of The Pool

It’s the last day of summer around here. Of course, summer will go on for another month or so, and students won’t return until the end of August, but tomorrow Timmy, Luci and I head to Black Forest Academy for All Staff Conference, the official beginning of the school year. So it seems only fitting…

Read More

Home Is Where The Jam Is

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my…

Read More

Sewing Machine

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.  Elizabeth Bishop, from “One Art”   The sewing machine came from downstairs. Also Americans working in missions, our neighbors have been in Europe for decades, so I correctly guessed that she…

Read More

Sustainability {Or, Measuring A Year}

Five hundred twenty-five thousand Six hundred minutes How do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets In midnights, in cups of coffee In inches, in miles In laughter, in strife In five hundred twenty-five thousand Six hundred minutes How do you measure A year in the life? From “Seasons of Love,” RENT June 24…

Read More

A Witness of Transformation

The morning of my last Commencement Day, I woke up feeling rested and disoriented. I’d been traveling for almost three months in Great Britain and Ireland, and that morning, I was in Riomaggiore, the southernmost village of the Cinque Terre, in northern Italy, spending a week traveling with a friend from home after my quarter…

Read More

A Chronicle of Longing

A very happy Last Day of Class from Black Forest Academy. For me, there are still two weeks of work left: two exams, two ceramics critiques, a debate, a graduation ceremony, and a few days of staff meetings and moving the Middle School. This makes our final day a little anticlimactic compared to the homework-burning,…

Read More