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…

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Last Words, Not Famous

The squeals of accomplishment and relief fill the air as the final bell rings on the last day of school. Finals still loom, but that’s all the way after the weekend. Until then, my juniors can bask in the accomplishment of their penultimate year of school. As has become tradition, I’ve written them a letter,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.”…

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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,…

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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…

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