Northern Exposure

NB: This is a re-post from the first day of autumn a couple of years ago. The air had that certain chill tonight as I returned home from a lovely night out with a great friend, and I felt compelled to pull of the Northern Exposure DVDs so I can watch one while sip my coffee and clean the kitchen tomorrow. The lure of Northern Exposure happens every year just about this time.
..............................................................................................................................................

I think it's the descent into winter. Every year at this time, I watch re-runs of the television series Northern Exposure. I am partial to the episodes that center on Adam and Eve - seasons 2, 3, 4  - because I am a sucker for a chef, shoeless, with religious adherence to a glace de viande. Oh, la la. Blue knitted hat and all.

This is the last day of fall. Not by the calendar, but we are predicted to have 1-3 inches of snow tomorrow, and a venison stew is on my stove. When the light is waning, when the cold is descending, I tune in to re-runs of Northern Exposure in order to brace my self for the winter ahead. I started this tradition back in 2003, when we first realized we would be moving North. From Cambridge, which is, admittedly, already quite North.

Currently, I am cooking and listening to Season Three, episode 18. Shelley sheds her skin, Joel gets some education from the local healer, and Maggie is romanced by the Bear Man. Not the one who gets mauled in the documentary Bear Man - a cuter one, more like Eric Northman, less like Grizzly Adams.

My students are feeling the effects of darker mornings and shorter evenings. They have less light in which to do their homework, the sports are moving indoors, and it's becoming dark, depressing, sad. I feel it, as their teacher. I feel the need to spark into their classroom experience, to inspire them with the light of knowledge in contrast to the darkening of their days.

Oh, the pressure.

But it's good for me to amp up the animation in response to their ennui...but with six months of it ahead of me, I fear for my endurance.

And, just to say, this is not at all what I planned to write about this evening....I had a whole THING...and then it got dark, and the words changed places. Such is the writing life.

Isn't it Romantic?

Spring in New Hampshire has been delayed somewhat by last week's blizzard, and I'm ready for that snow to melt away into mellow fruitfulness. I could not resist the lure of spring: today's vocabulary word of the day was "vernal." The students shouted out "vernal equinox!" and "vernal pools!" the moment I wrote it up on the board, and someone commented that they heard the first peeper of the season last night. The first daffodil from my garden is on my desk (I dump my wood stove ashes outside the mudroom door near the daffodil bed, and it forces them to bloom early). Latin ver means, predictably, spring. The official dictionary definition lists the meanings as: 1. of, relating to, or occurring in the spring; 2. Fresh or new like the spring. In order to segue into the lesson of the day, I asked them how they might use the word "vernal" in a poem to mean something other than spring. I got some great suggestions, but my favorite was as an adjective for a new feeling, "Maybe if you are sad, and then something makes you happy. It would be a vernal happiness."

Lovely.


Under the word vernal, where I always list the cultural literacy term of the day, I had written the word "Romanticism." My eager-beaver eighth graders started to ask for the definition. Whoah, nelly. Not so fast. How about I set up the context for the romantic movement and then the class can tell me what the definition is.


Before the romantic movement, Europe was in the middle of a period in which intellectualism, remove, and abstract thinking was prized. Think reason. Think science. One seventh grader almost exploded out of his seat, arm up, index finger pointed to the heavens, yelling, "The ENGLIGHTENMENT!!!" and I rewarded him with a big fat extra credit point and promised to tell his history teacher about the connection after class. Fist-bumps all around. 


So - reason. Science. Now, let's read some poems from the English romantic tradition and try to figure out what these poets were trying to create. 


Lines Written in Early Spring [c.f. "vernal"]
William Wordsworth

I heard a thousand blended notes,          

While in a grove I sate reclined,          

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts          

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.           

To her fair works did Nature link          

The human soul that through me ran;          

And much it grieved my heart to think          

What man has made of man.           

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,          

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;                         10        

And 'tis my faith that every flower          

Enjoys the air it breathes.           

The birds around me hopped and played,          

Their thoughts I cannot measure:

But the least motion which they made          

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.           

The budding twigs spread out their fan,          

To catch the breezy air;          

And I must think, do all I can,          

That there was pleasure there.                              20          

If this belief from heaven be sent,          

If such be Nature's holy plan,          

Have I not reason to lament          

What man has made of man?                                         

They caught the "What man has made of man," although they could not have missed it, I read it so slowly and looked at them meaningfully when I said it. I always think of Duke Orsino from Twelfth Night when I read this poem. In the first scene of the play, Orsino is lounging around, mooning over the lovely Olivia and announces that he has no other choice but to head out to the garden to swoon about and think his love-thoughts under a canopy of flowers. Even if you have never read the play, you know the beginning to this lovesick scene. It starts with, "If music be the food of love, play on." Romeo moons about in the same way at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet. Orsino and Romeo are the epitome of the British romantic poet, in love with love and the beauty of the world when it's bathed in love's rosy glow.  


We headed out onto the field on the lea and experienced ten thousand daffodils "tossing their heads in a sprightly dance" from Wordsworth's "The Daffodils," then moved on to Shelley and Keats' Odes - West Winds blowing through tousled hair, nightingales heard through drowsy sleep, and grecian urns telling tales of heroic deeds. I capped off the English romantic experience with "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." The progression had some logic; if I started with lines written in early spring, I was bound to finish in Keats' "To Autumn."


The romantic period took a few extra years to make its way to the States, but it turned up in the form of our Transcendentalist friends from New England. Whitman expresses the thinking of the American romantic movement beautifully in the last poem of the day. 


When I Heard the Learned Astronomer
Walt Whitman
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 rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.


The real experience of the stars, writes Whitman, is not to be found in the reason of proofs and figures, but in gazing upward, in the mystical moist night-air. We debated this for a while; the students felt that the viewpoints did not have to be mutually exclusive. One boy said that science could also be an opportunity to think about the world in a new way, no less valuable than poetry.


"So, what should I write down on the board?" I asked them. "How do we define "romanticism" based on what we discussed today?"


"Too much of a good thing," one student said, with a bit of disdain. She's not the romantic type. More of an Enlightenment type.


"What is?" I asked. 


"The whole romantic movement. They were trying to move away from reason, and they went waaaaaaay overboard." 


"Well," I said, "Isn't that what reactionary movements do? The pendulum is over here," I walk way over to the window on one side of the room, "and in order to move away from here, we have to swing way the heck over here." I walk over to window on the opposite side of the room. 


One minute left. I picked up a dry erase marker, popped off the top, and waited, pen poised to write. "Come on, give me something. What's romanticism about?"


"Feelings, lots of feelings," said one girl. I smiled at her and refused to write.


In the last seconds of class, we managed to scribble "return to imagination, nature, personal experience," and, in a stroke of brilliance, one student chimed in with Ezra Pound - a phrase she knew was anachronistic, yet absolutely appropriate to this lesson: "Make it new." 


I put the following definition in their mailboxes after class, but I don't think they needed it. They did a pretty good job defining "romanticism" all on their own. They were absolutely people upon whom nothing was lost, and my work for the day was done. 


Romanticism: the artistic movement that began in Germany and England in the second half of the 18th century marked by a concern for individual imagination, and emotion over intellect and reason. Primary philosophies of the romantic movement are:
     1. a belief in the innate goodness of man in his natural state;
     2. individualism;
     3. reverence for nature;
     4. revolt against political authority and social convention.

This Flatlander's Dirty Laundry

Yep. Another re-post. So sue me. Report cards were due on Thursday and my book proposal was due on Friday, so my creative reserves are at an all-time low. I just don't have any words left over, and besides, it's still gray, cold, barren winter here in central New Hampshire. We get glimpses of spring in the form of bear sightings and the smell of wood smoke and boiling maple sap, but I'm desperate for the thaw that will finally break the ice in Grant Brook and get my creative juices flowing again.

We put down an offer on our little house in Lyme Center village seven years ago this month. I'd stalked it for quite a while before that, and the first time I pulled into what would become our driveway, I could hear Grant Brook raging behind the house. The spring thaw was underway, and the roar of the water between the lingering ice shelves was incredible. I heard that sound, peeked in the windows, saw past the dead black locust threatening the sun room roof, the peeling paint and obvious work ahead of me, and fell in love. This is the story of how we found our home here in New Hampshire; how this family of flatlanders managed to become Lymies. 

We moved to Lyme, New Hampshire because we were in search of a home. A town that offered our children woods, streams, meadows and ponds – places they could explore and acquire the sensory memories that would render them acquainted with nature. The sudden and shocking upwelling of frigid spring water in an otherwise warm lake. The silver underside of leaves revealed by the winds before a summer rainstorm. The smell of an impending snowfall mixed with wood smoke. Wet spittlebug foam and soft milkweed down. We also wanted our kids to know the comfort of neighbors and to feel as if they were growing up in a place where they could depend on the people around them. We searched for just such a place for over two years before we found it.

Our dream house – tiny, with peeling paint on an acre of neglected land - was way out of our price range, as most dream houses tend to be. It sat at the main intersection of a small village halfway between Lyme Plain and Dartmouth Skiway.

We circled the house, peeked in the windows, and explored the rain-swollen brook behind the yard, and did our best not to fall in love with the house. Really, we couldn't begin to afford it. The house had been purchased as a flip by a real estate agent looking to take advantage of a booming real estate market. She bought the house on the cheap, updated the kitchen, and put it back on the market for far more than it was worth. And there it sat. And sat, for over a year. Neighbors shook their heads at its overinflated price and despaired over its lonely condition. The owner received offers, some approaching her asking price, but all were refused. Time passed, and the booming real estate market started to slip. And slide. And tumble. Offers continued to come in at realistic price points, but she would not be moved. She was losing money with each new month, and when I sensed her panic rising to a desperate crescendo, I let it slip, ever so casually, that I loved her house. She told me where to find the key, and what I was welcome to check the house out whenever I liked. I thought I was the sly one, but in retrospect, the key was a brilliant move on her part.

I had been visiting the outside of the house for almost a month, and now, armed with the key, I spent inordinate amounts of time in its empty rooms, poking around the basement, conducting amateur home inspections. I threw tennis balls to our dog in the backyard, poked around in the overgrown gardens, and mentally arranged my furniture in its empty rooms. Under direct questioning, I played it cool, and I certainly did not tell anyone that I had been visiting the house almost daily, like some sort of real estate stalker.

Finally, two weeks before she was due to give birth to her third child, she uttered the fateful words,

"Make me an offer. I won't be insulted."

So I did, and she wasn't.

The house was ours just one year, five months, and six days after we first peeked in the windows, imagining our furniture, our kids, our lives within its walls.

The final piece of the equation depended on our neighbors. I had yet to meet anyone in the neighborhood, despite the fact that I had all but pitched a tent in the backyard. They had been watching me over the past couple of months. They watched as I walked around the house, pulled weeds from the gardens, and picked at the peeling paint. I’m sure they speculated about the odd woman in the silver Honda who visited their village nearly every day. The employees of the insurance agency across the street watched me eat my picnics in the yard while I watched them eat their lunches on the post office steps.

These same people are now my neighbors, and I depend on their generosity every day. We carpool each other’s children, raid each other’s gardens, help ourselves to eggs from other’s chicken coops. I’ve borrowed just about everything from my neighbors – generators, ladders, bottles of wine, headlamps, scythes, a wood splitter. We even have a loose neighborhood DVD exchange system. We know where each other’s DVDs are stored, and it’s understood that we are to let ourselves in to each other’s houses in order to make movie selections when the mood strikes.

But I am afraid I stretched the bounds of neighborly interdependence into the realm of the absurd yesterday.


I’ve been a little scattered, what with building a new home for my chickens, writing, dealing with the dogs’ eye infections, and seeing to my older son’s post-tooth-extraction soft-food diet. I was rushing off to pick my younger son up from school, and I thought I had packed the required button- and snap-free clothing for his gymnastics class, but in my rush, I forgot, and I did not have enough time to double back home.

I thought I was stuck. Until I remembered the Canning-Coldwells. Rick, Stacie and their three kids live a couple of miles away in the direction of the gymnastics class. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Stacie’s car in the driveway, but when I knocked and rang the doorbell, but there was no sign of life in the house. I stuck my head in the door.

“Hello? Rick? Stacie? Hello?”

That’s when I saw the size 4T sleeve dangling out of the dirty clothes hamper.

The coast was clear. The house was silent save for the distinctive Santa-jingle of the bells hanging from the Coldwell-Canning’s door. I tiptoed (why? I have no idea, it was obvious no one was home) over to the three-tiered hamper and pulled the striped shirt out of the middle bin.

The Caldwell’s definition of dirty must be a little looser than the Lahey’s, because it was easy to find a presentable pair of leggings to go with the shirt.

I had two choices. I could take the clothes, and if no one was home when we were done with them, simply return them to the hamper. I could even dangle the sleeve out, just the way I found it. I would unveil this particular anecdote sometime in the distant future, at a shared dinner, after a bottle of wine or two. I am a little worried about what this choice says about my character.

The second option was to leave a note, come clean immediately, and trust that Rick and Stacie know me well enough not to be horrified that I pawed through their dirty laundry in search of an outfit. But time was short. And I didn’t have a pen.

So we were off. I hustled Finnegan into the gymnasium, in Vermont, clearly over the NH/VT border and therefore out of the jurisdiction of the NH dirty clothing police. I pulled off Finnegan's button and snap-laden outfit, took a deep breath, and dressed him in the neighbor’s dirty clothes. About ten minutes later, as Finn was preparing to head down to his gymnastics class, “Jess! Hey! What are you doing here?”

Christ. Abort. Abort. You have been made. Repeat. Abort.

Rick’s stops in this tracks, happy to see me, and yet...his eyes shift from me, to Finnegan, then back to me.

“Hey – Adelaide has an outfit just like that….”

Just go ahead and add cross-dressing my son to today’s list of transgressions.

I used to teach Pride and Prejudice in my British Literature class, and I have always loved Mr. Bennet’s quip, “For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” The significance of this line was made very clear to me today, the day I became the Main Event.

Fortunately, I was right about my neighbors. Rick does know me well enough to not be horrified that I pawed through his dirty clothes hamper. He said I was welcome to their dirty clothes anytime.

Twitterpated

Finn, Twitterpated

Yesterday was a great day. Besides the obvious electoral happiness, I had the opportunity to quote Henry VI on Facebook before I went to bed, and that does not happen very often. I mean, I'm a dork, but I restrain myself for the appearance of normality. 

"Why ring not out the bells aloud throughout the town? Dauphin, command the citizens make bonfires And feast and banquet in the open streets To celebrate the joy that God hath given us."

I'm not a church-going sort of gal, but the sentiment felt right.

This morning, I woke up in a particularly exuberant mood and quoted John Adams on Facebook (shut up, that's what exuberant dorky people do on the morning after a great event), hoping someone would understand my happiness and relief.

"Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion."

This quote is from Adams' essays protesting the Stamp Act, and, yes, I am happy to report that two people recognized it.

Let me back up. While the general election was going on, a bunch of civic-minded 8th grade students took ownership of the electoral process, and spent hours to build a very elaborate polling booth with curtain, lockbox, and Latin phrases (e pluribus unum) painted on the outside. They convinced the every student of average courage to vote. They even dragged the lower school in when they had the opportunity, and I heard from my son Finnegan (9) that (and I quote), I GOT TO VOTE!!! He was rather twitterpated about the gravity of the event and delighted that he'd been asked for his opinion on electoral matters. See above picture for an approximation of his happiness. That's how I felt when I rushed out between classes yesterday to vote at Lyme Elementary School. Twitterpated and delighted to have been asked. 

On top of all that good stuff, I got to spent last evening tweeting the election for Edutopia and the New YorkTimes' Learning Network at #EduElection. I am fortunate enough to write for The New York Times' Learning Network so I had an entree into the occasion, but I greatly admire the two writers from Edutopia who had the wherewithall to organize the Twitter hashtag for students on election night. Sarah Mulhern Gross and JonathanOlsen deserve some serious kudos. 

I was all about #EduElection last night for almost five hours...except the moments when I got confused and tweeted to the nonexistent hashtag #EduEducation. I actually got to tweet some [insanely ineloquent and inane] answers to wonderful student questions like this:

(brace yourself, I warned you, I use the word poll three times in 140 characters)

And, I'm not proud to say, this:

But finally, when the news came in that the election was being called for Obama, I called it a night on Twitter, peeled my flattened and sore butt off of our kitchen couch, and went to check on my boys. 

No, I did not resist the urge to wake and inform them of the election results despite the [very] late hour. Benjamin (14) remembers my intrusion around 11:30. He says, "I remember because I was upset that you woke me up" but Finnegan does not. He was snuggling with Rotta the Huttlet (Jabba's son; long story, he looks a like a booger in the guise of a plush toy) and rolled over when I whispered the election results in his ear. 

I don't care so much if he remembers the precise moment of Obama's victory; just that he understands the historial significance of my nocturnal annoyance. I gently whispered in his ear that Obama had won a second term, and, of equal importance, in his home state of New Hampshire, women won all. He rolled over and went back to sleep, but I know he understood. His waking hours are full of strong women who will never forget to remind him to celebrate the joy that God hath given us. 

Once There Was a Thing Called Spring

It may take longer for spring to arrive here in New Hampshire, but as a teacher, I think that can be a good thing. As soon as the light changes from gray to golden, the kids can feel that  the the freedom of a long summer is near. This year, we had an early spring that lapsed back into winter, and the kids felt cheated, as if the promise of an approaching summer had been ripped out from under their feet. The daffodils had just begun to emerge from the earth when the snow began to fall again. The best skiing of this New Hampshire winter came after the threat of winter was past and the kids had put their skis away in the basement. But not me. I skate-skied my heart out on the last of the winter's offerings.

When spring came around a second time in April, I still had miles to go and entire plays to teach. As far as my students were concerned, spring had come, and gone, and come again, and it was past time for school to be over.

The seventh grade is coming up on their Twelfth Night performances, so we spend a lot of time out on the playground, blocking scenes. I plan the eighth grades' performances for good fall weather and the seventh grade performances for good spring weather, because it's too loud when they all rehearse in our small middle school at the same time. The eighth grade has the larger parts in our schools' spring musical, so I make sure they memorize Shakespeare in the fall rather than the spring, when they are also trying to memorize their lines in the musical - The Music Man, incidentally.

The eighth grade English class is in the middle of reading King Lear and rehearsing their graduation speeches. We are in the chaos of the storm on the heath, and I have assigned a final project for this book that's...well, unconventional. Sometimes, conventional just isn't going to work, particularly in this second spring. The eighth grade has been asked to create their own visual representation of the storm in King Lear - the one inside Lear, the one outside; all of it matters.. Years ago, I asked my Rowland Hall/St. Marks School students to do the same, and they created some incredible stuff. Sculptures of words, cotton, wool, paper, wire, and velvet, and I was awed. I hear that this time around, my students are creating video and audio presentations as well as the sculptural presentations I have come to expect. I love this assignment so much, I am creating something, too, and I can't wait for the unveiling.

We all have aspirations of summer vacation. I have writing deadlines - wonderful, exciting assignments - that hover out there, just waiting for classes to end. I get to hand a book proposal in to an editor who is actually excited to receive it. I have assignments to write four magazine articles, all about stuff I know little or nothing about, but can't wait to learn. Best of all, a New Hampshire writer friend of mine, Tom Ryan, asked me to write the author interview and its introduction for the HarperCollins paperback release of Following Atticus. There's some more big news surrounding that book that I am not allowed to talk about quite yet, but suffice it to say that I am indebted to Tom and his Harper Collins editor for their faith and support of my writing.

But before all that can happen, I have King Lear and Twelfth Night. I have to make up for my students' waning attention spans with my own manic enthusiasm, and simply pray that we all make it though the musical, final exams, the school trip to Montreal, and graduation.

New Englanders hope for spring, wait through six months of winter, slog through mud season and swat through black fly season. And then it comes. The beginning of the most beautiful season on earth.