snow swirled around
in exchange for a strike
(we’ll save our signs though)
only a few came
to fill the seats of our schools
(because weather bites)
even in winter
no teacher will miss a day
(we’re there for our kids)
someday they’ll see that
(through blizzards of ignorance)
until they see us
I just want to think about how hard-won this moment is. This day. This five of us skiing down a mountain together. This money we didn’t have before that we have now.
This fresh powder.
This view. Could you beat that view if you went anywhere else in the world? Well, could you?
I don’t want to think about the five years we, a family of five, lived on a frozen, constituents-unwilling-to-vote-on-a-mill-levy teacher’s salary of $48,000. The $10,000 out-of-pocket expenses we paid to give birth to our third child. The penny-pinching. The laying-out-$400-every-three-months to earn those goddamn fifteen credits so I could get a raise if I … changed school districts.
I don’t want to think about how Spain screwed me out of a decent salary and we came home afterward with $19,000 in debt, more than any we’ve had as a married couple.
I don’t want to think about the TWO 1998 cars we have outside our house right now, car-payment free.
I don’t want to think about a teacher’s strike. I don’t want to think about my refugees trekking across town on two buses and being huddled into the auditorium to wait, without teachers, the long seven hours until they trek back, because if they don’t wait, they might not have a meal that day.
About the hundreds of hours I, and every teacher I know, has put into grading, planning, meeting, educating (ourselves and them), in the ten months between August and June. Hundreds of hours outside our contract day listening to students tell us their traumas that are greater than any soul could bear, listening to our admin and school district rate us as failures when we wake before dawn and go home after dusk to bring our best selves into that classroom every day, listening to our coworkers decide between renting a slumlord shithole or buying a house an hour away…
Listening.
I don’t want to think about the thousands of union workers who died for this day. For this choice. For a society where corporate greed is not the only answer.
I just want to see my husband and my three girls gliding down this Colorado slope, this Colorado hope.
I want to ski. To smile. To rejoice.
I don’t want to go on strike.
But I will.
Just like I walked in and out of Manual High School in 1994 when my teachers asked me to support them.
Just like I lived on pittance pay for the early part of my children’s lives.
Just like every other union member everywhere who’s looking to find empathy in the eyes of the corporate monsters that rule our society.
I will strike.
And I will ski.
And we will win ourselves a bluebird day.
second chance new year
we win with packed powder runs
and hope to move on
I wish I could say I am a set of skis, but this is not the case. If I were a set of skis, I’d be flying down the mountain right now, powder billowing up around me in glittery fury. I’d be turning over moguls and clapping flakes off from the lift and racing my daughter’s skis down.
I’d be free.
But I am not a set of skis. I am a louse.
I am the louse found at the nape of my oldest’s neck, as pale brown as her hair, almost, almost invisible.
I am the louse that enters your classroom and tries for twenty minutes to think of positivity and negativity and mix it all together with nits for words in an online documentation that we all try to wash away with Nix.
I am the louse that enters your friendship, trying so hard to show you how genuinely I love you, laying my eggs in every place you thought you’d never find in hopes that with one, with just one minuscule combing, you’d choose to keep me there, tenacious and prolific and ever-loyal to the warmth of your scalp.
I am the louse that enters my classroom, sneaking between desks, reaching out with my frail antennae in the somewhat-silent attempt to encourage students to reach up, scratch, and move their eyes away from their phones and onto the idea, just the idea, that a good comb-through could bring them an education.
I am the louse hiding at the base of the bristle on the brush, in the stitches of the winter hood, in the soft cotton bedding bought from the bargain store. Waiting. Breathing in my twenty-four hours of life one solitary pull of oxygen at a time, hoping for a single strand to clasp, to scurry up, to hold on to until I reach the warmth of humanity, until I can rejuvenate my weakened heart with the blood of someone else’s life.
I am the louse of motherhood, the constant irritation of teen angst wishing to be rid of me, my frail footprints finding no real response to my desperate attempts to make a home on these humans’ hearts.
If I were a set of skis, I’d be flying across a Colorado bluebird day. Over mountain passes. Into a bowl so deep with powder you couldn’t find your tips.
But I am a louse. And lice don’t ski.
They breed.
thirty below wind
can’t stop the skis from spinning
from this forest view
on a bluebird day
my oldest learned to snowboard
by a lesson’s luck
(we three skied all day
basking in twenty degrees
of fresh powdered sun)
My fortieth April comes to an end with pink flowers and red shirts. Both images are equally beautiful and painful–fuchsia tinted with the blood, sweat, and tears we put on the line every day for a society that vilifies us and threatens us with jail time for shutting down schools for a singular day–when that same society has worked to shut down schools for decades.
My fortieth April is these nachos–too damn big to consume, too impossible to say no to–because sometimes life just feels like a challenge we must at least attempt to make a mockery of.
My fortieth April means my parents are in Paris, on their way to only four months in Europe because I begged them not to totally leave me, sell the house, and disappear from our lives when I’ve just lost my father-in-law and every remnant of parenthood on my husband’s side of the family.
My fortieth April brings the beginning of the end of my children’s childhoods–no more towing them in the bike trailer, no more feeding them from rubber spoons, no more shuttling them to elementary school–instead, the hard reality that they will ride their own paths, make their own decisions, and quite often, leave me behind.
My fortieth April means half of my life has been in the warmth of this man’s arms, this man who flew alone to Tennessee to bury his father while I made a mockery of life with nachos, this man who has never done a thing but work to please the people in his life, who speaks so little but whose actions speak volumes… volumes of loving and giving.
My fortieth April has been hell. Our school district has desks twenty years old and teacher salaries to match. My husband is in a union job that will likely screw him out of one because of seniority. My oldest daughter’s first words to me on my fortieth birthday were, “Can I have my phone back?” My beloved father-in-law died. My parents boarded a plane. My school district’s open enrollment healthcare plan is $1000 a month with a $3500 deductible and $12,700 out-of-pocket maximum. We have bought and paid for six weeks in Iberia and are beginning to wonder why.
My fortieth April is these blue skies. These smiling faces. This willingness to stand up to the truth behind teachers’ vilification. These parents eating French fries in France. This beautiful set of girls we have somehow managed to raise, healthy and unscathed. This fuchsia bleeding into red shirts at Casa Bonita, making a mockery of all that is pain, all that is life.
My fortieth April comes to an end with pink flowers and red shirts. Because we’re all a little bruised after forty years on this Earth. Because the blood, sweat, and tears that go into living this life are as beautiful as the laughter, mockery, and joy.
My fortieth April is the middle of spring. And just like all the other springs that have made up my life, it is time to spring forward, time to smile, time to move on.
Because it’s April–it snows and burns a crisp on our necks within the same week–and we must learn that even the red scars of sunburn will eventually fade into the soft petals of fuchsia.
over Trail Ridge Road
you’ll visit every season
(finding home in each)
from spring to winter,
Colorado wins my heart
the best home on earth
family’s found here too:
in fires and puffed pancakes
bigger than ourselves
it’s that blue sky range
just past the elk on the trail
that leads our hearts home
one week after snow:
sunny summer theme park day
because spring’s fucked up
because we need this:
desertification looms
just beyond the bend
(Trump looms there as well,
where the ninety-degree March
made some record highs)
and so? a snow march
to keep precipitation
where it belongs: Earth
Step Write Up 