tree-lined streets adieu
NOLA saved for memories
as we meet the dawn
Pensacola Beach:
a hot disappointment rests
behind Blue Angels
but once the sky clears
the clear water saves the day
before sea-bridge drive
our Florida lesson:
aim for blue skies, check schedules,
and fly for our dreams
on a perfect day
with music following us
on every corner
i sometimes get trapped
in thoughts of poverty, loss
(also on corners)
my girls all grinning
taking pics and buying gifts–
the perfect white life
yet anger jumps out
from car windows and bar doors,
a cruel reminder:
we’re not all equal.
some of us can ride trolleys,
take month-long road trips.
others beg for change
with thin plastic drinking cups
that they’ll fill later
in all this joy: grief.
vacations are like heaven
mixed with sorrow
midnight thunder struck
after opossums purred by
searching us for peace
these were our night sounds,
cicadas’ long lullaby
and small waves lapping
the rain drove us here
across state lines new to us
with new warning signs
bridge that cut through glass
brought us to the lost city
found again by sun
new sounds now rock us
of saxophones and jazz clubs
that purr by for peace
all in a day’s work:
a touch of nature, people;
all in the journey
dawn painted this view
with a crimson feathered brush
shaped from god’s fingers
interrupted drive
on solitary farm roads
brings peace and worry
fresh peaches save us,
and hand picked Texas peanuts–
bag reads: God bless you
red dirt gets seeded
turning desert land to food
to feed our hot drive
at last, a forest:
lodgepole and endless lake
to wash off the dust
teary pet goodbye
gives way to mountains and plains
peppered by gray sky
storms hover past us
as curvy roads snake Texas
with speeds much too high
we drive till sunset,
kiss the red canyon good night,
find our hobbit hole
Just before we left the mountains after the long weekend, the girls were asking their father to borrow his pocket knife so that they could carve their names into a tree trunk.
“We need to leave our mark!”
“We’re getting in the car in five minutes. You had all weekend to do that. Not now.”
They had all weekend to explore. To see where the nonexistent paths might take them. They found bottles that drunk former campers had left behind and found pleasure shattering them against boulders. They climbed over fallen tree trunks in an attempt to get to the next outlook or outhouse. They discovered several carcasses and took pieces in their hands to pretend to roast, brush the teeth of, or assign names to. They built and destroyed campfires, each claiming a stick and making rainbow sparklers dance across the sky. They set up their own tent and fought over who had the best pad, the warmest sleeping bag, the most comfortable spot. They made charcoal paint from ashen logs and drew on paper plates, clothes… themselves. They picked up giant pieces of bark and an abandoned rope, making an old-fashioned telephone “show” as they handed the “receiver” back and forth for hours on end, chatting about extended metaphors and checking current schedules for fire-fixing availability. They disappeared for hours on end, hiking several miles, discovering miniature ponds in large boulders, old cables that worked as trampolines, views of distant peeks… and … themselves.
They couldn’t carve their names into the trunks of trees because they were already leaving a piece of themselves behind. In a world surrounded by screens and studying and neat city blocks with perfect yards and friendly neighbors, they released themselves into nature as all children should. They giggled with their friends and had free reign over their weekend kingdom.
As we made our way down the dusty dirt road onto the smooth pavement that curved its snakelike yellow line out of the canyon, I was thinking about the pieces of all of us that are scattered behind us wherever we go. In their own way, my girls left their imprint on that mountain, with eighteen sets of shoe prints, a forgotten wisp of paper towel, a broken branch. But more importantly, the mountain left a piece of itself in us. The panicked drive up with nauseous travelers and no sites in sight. The scratches and ripped pants from too many falls and rough rocks. The charcoaled face paint. The layers of dirt and pine needles and campfire stench unwashable by the best of the best machines.
The memory of a weekend free of chores, free of homework, free of nagging, free of screens, free of strict diets, free…
Free.
In the end, Daddy didn’t give them the knife. Instead they piled in the Pilot, all seven of them, taking their new “telephone” to carry on their stories for the drive home. They pointed to peeks they’d topped on their independently-led hikes. They commented on how strangely smooth the pavement felt once we finally arrived to it. They napped near the end, fully exhausted from running a kingdom all weekend.
Even without a pocketknife, they left their names on that mountain. They carved them into the curve of the road that wrapped itself around our site. Into the bits of clouds that only barely covered the sun. Into the memory of every mountain, of every happy childhood that begins and ends with a bit of royalty, a bit of owning all your choices if even for a day.
A bit of freedom. It’s the best way to run a kingdom.
in mineral baths
i mock a tropical life
(yet i’m still so cold)
the snow drives us home
a lion-like March exit
to freeze my failure
nothing can replace
all the hours without them
now bathed with worse score
Friday, seventh period, fifteen minutes before the last bell:
“The reason we are reading all these picture books is because we’re going to walk over to an elementary school next week, interview kindergarteners, and create books for them. I did this in middle and high school and it was one of my most memorable classroom experiences. And a couple years ago I met a new DPS teacher who had gone to that elementary school. He not only still had his handmade book, but also said it was one of his most memorable school experiences and one of the reasons he became a teacher.”
“I’m going to ditch that day. Who’s with me?”
No one will ever tell you this when you’re in college. They’ll pump teaching up, make you think it’s your dream job, make you think you can change the world. That you can be there for one student or two or a thousand, and that you’re going to make a difference.
You’ll believe them. You’ll have small glimpses of hope and happiness every day. Kids who come in an hour early to clean out all your poor-urban-handout, made-for-elementary desks that have shelves underneath that high schoolers can barely fit their legs under and spend the entire school year filling with trash from vending machines that are open all day, and hiding and losing phones and tablets in, and leaving grant-requested precious books inside.
Or the kid who brings you spicy Eritrean food with his mom’s homemade injera bread to dip your tongue into another continent after all the hours you’ve spent helping him write essays for three years running, before dawn and after dark and every lunch in between. It all melts away with saffron and perfectly spongey texture soaking up the lost moments of planning, grading… Of other parts of your life.
Or the Nepali girls who play their fairy-like music after school, pushing all the desks to the side to practice their modern mashup dance of a culture you couldn’t begin to understand for the CultureFest that brings the quilt of your students together in an unforgettable annual celebration.
But.
It takes SO. MANY. Of those bright moments to erase the daily apathy, rudeness, and downright disregard that SO. MANY. Students have.
So I send him out. “You don’t want to develop a relationship with our community, participate with a kid, make a difference, and fulfill a promise to the kindergarten teachers who I told I would bring twenty-one students to interview? You want me to disappoint a five-year-old child?”
“You do whatever you want, Miss,” he says, packing up his backpack and walking out, fifteen minutes before the last bell on a Friday afternoon.
“Whatever I want” is to enjoy this weekend I have promised my just-turned-thirteen-year-old for six months. To get the hell out of this city, drive like a maniac into blue skies and snow, and participate in life with the children I hold closest to my heart.
But first there was a rock slide. I-70 closed ten miles before our destination. Then I arrive at the elementary school and my middle child is pouting like she’s two, refusing to tell me why. I leave her and her sister at piano to fulfill my carpool duties and get stuck at a string of red lights. Bruce comes coughing home after working in a knee-deep-in-mud manhole all day, takes a shower, and water leaks through the second-floor ceiling onto our beautiful wood floors, leaving a crack in the drywall and a repair-bill question yet to be answered. When he comes downstairs, he is shivering like a wet chihuahua, goes straight to bed, and informs me he has the flu. My middle child still pouts, has picked up the cold the other three of us have had all week, and has a canker sore the size of Idaho.
The two remaining children complete the two-hour ordeal of grocery shopping with me, picking out swimsuits for all. We return home to frantically make eight sandwiches, do two loads of laundry, pack up five people’s crap to fill the topper, and I lay my head down close to midnight only to be disturbed by the buzzing dryer, the curious kitten, and the Dowling need to clean the entire house before I leave.
But wait, since Bruce is sick, I now have to sacrifice two hours of this pressed-for-time morning to sit with Isabella in her Dumb Friends League volunteering orientation. I rush to Walgreens, the only close store, to get ice before our looming six-hour drive, and the goddamn store is out of ice.
Izzy’s friend finally arrives after Bruce officially declares he isn’t up for it, and I don’t even take the time to call my mother to ask her to come in his place. I hit the road like a woman on fire and blast my way through half the state, circumventing the rock slide by 140 miles, blue sky and snow, blue sky and snow.
We stop only two times. To get gas and load up on caffeine. And to avoid a mule deer who jumps in front of our two-lane trek. The girls minimally whine about how much longer and are we halfway there yet, but not enough to even raise the hairs on my neck. I’ve got a great playlist blasting U2, Bruce Springsteen, Usher, Adele, and Lennon, views worth a million bucks, and an open road.
I’ve got a thirteen-year-old whose aunt calls later to wish her a happy birthday and ask her if she was miserable about the double-time drive: “No way. I got to come to Glenwood for my birthday.”
I’ve got a middle child who is chipper today and takes blurry pictures for me and learns how to program the GPS to five different destinations as we navigate the back way.
I’ve got a baby girl who spends the entire six-hour drive happily drawing on and erasing her whiteboard to start all over again.
I’ve got a glimpse of that hope again. When we finally reach the exit from the circled-back, eastbound side of I-70, after passing twenty signs, taking three side routes, and talking about the rockslide all week, a Colorado State Trooper parks in front of two rows of orange cones that guide every car off at this exit.
“Look, this is where the highway is shut down,” I announce, taking a glance around the bright young faces that surround me as we have made a “record” time of five hours forty minutes when Google said 6.5.
“I wonder why,” Mythili ponders.
“Oh, Mythili,” but I can’t finish because I am laughing so hard, I am so deliriously happy that tears are streaming down my cheeks as I try to hold in spurts of laughter and joy that have been bottled up inside me since fifteen minutes before the last bell on Friday afternoon.
But I don’t need a bell to set me free. I just need a glimpse. A glimpse of blue sky over snow, of students who love me for how hard I work for them, of children who are grateful and humorous and quirky in these small moments that make a life, whether they are the fifteen minutes before the last bell or the fifteen tears that just need to fall.
Just a glimpse, a glimpse.
last night light flakes fell
to make a snow-bright morning
(soul slightly renewed)
i drove in silence
not able to think of words
that she’d understand
the unspoken sat
between us like the car crash
we saw just later
she spoke and screamed out
(firemen swarmed the panic
of woman on phone)
(i still had no words
nothing about the late night,
her sneaking downstairs)
(nothing on found phone
retrieved in secret to watch
the blossoms of lust)
just sadness, light flakes
falling from the winter sky
crashing our morning
so we said goodbye
(i gave her my hat and gloves.
she gave me a grin.)
(till midday flakes fell
then the sun burned all to mush
thoughts still unspoken)
to ring in New Year
we drove two hours past home
to make a weekend
we saw A-frame views
and slept in with circle flames
before we ventured
he slid us down hill
and we slid in the new year
with sleds, skis, snowshoes
because life is such:
moments of fear, winter ice
and warm flame endings
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