I think we’ve seen the last of them for this year: the first-day-of-school photos that spill down our social media screens. Darling children in their new clothes and unscuffed shoes, grinning for the camera and holding their signs: Amelia, second grade. Dylan, fourth. And the less-than-darling, I’m-too-old-for-this children, holding signs or not, wearing I-couldn’t-care clothes […]
Read moreTime spent teaching is never lost. I spent an hour in a 9th grade classroom yesterday. The first time in nearly five years. This was at a public school, Durham School of the Arts downtown. The place where my daughter now spends her days, where my middle son used to spend his. And we’ve lived […]
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The text had two questions, the first from the daughter, who is ten: “Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother: “(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the […]
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I drove the girls to school on Thursday, a late-summer, light-filled morning. It was just the third week of school, day thirteen if we’re keeping count, which might not be a good idea. The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking […]
Read moreThis is not how it should be. Not, at any rate, what I would have it. I am sick. So sick. On a weekend. It started at about 11 on Friday night, not long after the last of my 9th grade students left our house and our end-of-year party, the party during which 22 out […]
Read moreLife feels new to me today. We closed our play last night, you see (and this word, “closed” makes it seem a Much Bigger Deal than it was, as it only ran two nights. But we are, for now, a small school), and so the day feels less compressed, less hemmed-in than the last weeks […]
Read moreis staying up too late tonight. I think in the last week and a half, I haven’t been to bed before twelve. And as I am up (always) by 6:30, going to bed that late is Just Too Late. Tonight things will be different. Tonight I am not making a salt and flour map of […]
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