Routines Begin Again

This morning I could take my time and stop and take pictures on my way to school. No students until tomorrow morning. There has been a draw down again this fall on Lake Roosevelt causing my favorite Barnaby Island to no longer be an island. Driving by this island above will be part of my routine every day now as I drive down the lake to school. I won't always take the time to stop.
I like the quiet time right before school starts. LH put new wax on the floor so the hallway just gleamed as I headed to my empty classroom. I sat and had think time as I filled in my daily plans. Routines begin again. Classroom set up, nametags out, pencils sharpened, lunch packed, clothes laid out, new shoes waiting, school bag ready to grab, nails polished, thermos ready to fill, camera packed, iPod charging, and alarm clock is set.

Tomorrow is my 32nd first day of school as a teacher. Each year of teaching has been new and different, but the excitement and anticipation never goes away!

Sibling Assignment #105: Love, Kindness, and Beauty with Jane Kenyon

I gave the sibling assignment this week.
Other than family members, who has been an influential person in your life and why?
You will find Raymond Pert's lovely tribute to Rick Frost here and Silver Valley Girl's here soon.


Three Songs at the End of Summer

A second crop of hay lies cut

and turned. Five gleaming crows

search and peck between the rows.

They make a low, companionable squawk,

and like midwives and undertakers

possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,

parting before me like the Red Sea.

The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned

to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.

Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone

suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,

fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.

The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod

brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;

water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks

over me. The days are bright

and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today

for an hour, with my whole

body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,

and a crow, hectoring from its nest

high in the hemlock, a nest as big

as a laundry basket ...

In my childhood

I stood under a dripping oak,

while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,

waiting for the school bus

with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off

this same complex organic scent.

I had the new books—words, numbers,

and operations with numbers I did not

comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled

by use, in a blue canvas satchel

with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien

I stood at the side of the road.

It was the only life I had.

Jane Kenyon

Thumbing through poetry anthologies a few years ago, I found numerous poems by Jane Kenyon. In Billy Collin's poetry 180 I was first introduced to Otherwise, in his book 180 more I first read Happiness. When Garrison Keillor compiled poems he read on Writer's Almanac into Good Poems for Hard Times I first devoured This Morning and reflected on Let Evening Come in Good Poems. The themes of Jane Kenyon's poems resonated with me. Images of the changing of seasons, rural living, and observations of everyday life in the country opened up to me the notion that simple pleasures can be captured in a poetic form. I continued to read and appreciate her poetry and learned more about her life. After graduating from the University of Michigan she married poet Donald Hall and they moved to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire where she continued with her writing life. She read and reread authors such as Keats, Chekhov, and Bishop. Not until I read Donald Hall's memoir The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon did I understand her struggle with depression during her adult life. Stricken with leukemia in 1993, she fought another batter and continued until her last days to write each and every day. She died in 1995 at the age of 48.

"There are things in life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?" -Jane Kenyon

She influenced me as a writer because she disciplined herself to observe the world and write about it each and every day. Also, during her long walks with her dog each day she carefully noticed her surroundings. She captured the light in the hayloft, the silver moon, a beautiful fox. She was able to express her inner world , but didn't allow depression to become the centerpiece of her writing. She influenced me as a person because of her drive to do good in the world. She lived with depression, cancer, death of loved ones, and her husband's illness . She kept her routine and appreciation of life.

Knowing she wasn't going to live much longer she completed her final anthology Otherwise in those last days. She was reading, listening to her husband reread words, arguing over titles to include, still trying to wrestle with the right words. She never gave up that passion for words, love, kindness, family, and beauty. She continues to influence me as I immerse myself in her works. This is the first poem in that anthology entitled Otherwise:

Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon.
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
-Jane Kenyon
I have posted the following poems by Jane Kenyon on this blog . You can read Otherwise here, Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks here, Let Evening Come here

Late Summer In a Jar

Wandering through the garden in late August I never know what I will find in bloom. This beautiful pink Unforgettable rose was a surprise. I love the combination of sunflowers, soon to bloom Autumn Joy sedum, and ivy geranium. I found one mum I could add to the bouquet, but many will soon be in bloom. I snipped the scented geranium leaves to add a mix to the fragrance as we enjoy late summer in a jar inside.

A Photo Shoot with McDuff

For those of you that have been visiting here awhile, you have had the pleasure of meeting McDuff, our senior cat member, posing in a variety of pictures. He followed me around recently so I figured he must want to be photographed. Let me reintroduce you to McDuff. Above he paused for his regal look. He loves doing the side pose. As he was trying to pose for a shot walking away, Shelby decided she needed to just make sure that was our McDuff approaching the front door. When asked to show emotion, McDuff played it up with a look that says, "What do you mean you are out of cat treats? WAAAAAAHHHHH!"Ooops.... wrong cat. Kit had to have at least one photo in the series, or it just wouldn't be right. Here he is on the other side of the garden gate waiting for me to come in.

Each day as I pull another date page of August off my desk calendar, I get more excited for school to begin. For some the excitement begins when they shop for new school clothes. Others it is finding a new metal lunch pail. My hair stylist last week would have said it is when all the high school girls come to get "their new dos". I work in an older building, which I love, because as I walked down the hall today the smell of new wax and the shine on the floor reminded me of my own school days.
Two of my former students helped me move heavy furniture and hook up computers for a bit this afternoon. A copy of a poem was on the table. This led to a discussion of poetry and what we had read and written and remembered. Both of these young men are remarkable poets. This inspired me to reread some poetry after they left. When I think of school and comments written in margins of books ( we now use sticky notes!), I couldn't help but think of this poem by Billy Collins. Thinking about all of us and marginalia got me even more eager for school to begin!

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Billy Collins

In the above book by H.J. Jackson she is proposing the poetics of marginalia. You can learn more about the book here.

August's Last Hurrah!

I often feel that just when certain plants get with it and others are ready to burst into color, my time of photographing the garden during the day is ending. I can do early morning tours, evening tours, and of course the flowers will be here on week-ends, but these last few days I have enjoyed grabbing the camera when the light was good and catch some summer memories. Tomorrow I begin to ease into school mode with a teacher inservice day. Say hello to late August with an ivy geranium above, a lovely morning glory , an Annabelle hydrangea , pretty dianthus,and a rose shouting her last hurrah!