sometimes blue linings
found high above the city
make silver feel frail
Color Me Home
sometimes blue linings
found high above the city
make silver feel frail
vacation
Tweaks
The day begins with tweaking. That is all that life is, really. Just one small tweak in a different direction and the result could be completely the opposite. If my daughter tweaks that steering wheel just a little more to the left, we could have a head-on collision. If I tweak my reaction to her left-leaning grip to a scream instead of a stifled breath, the whole day could be doomed by her admonishment of my “criticism.”
If you could just tweak your lesson by a few words, you could build up the academic vocabulary.
If you could just tweak your email a little bit, I would actually understand the task you are asking me to accomplish by the end of tomorrow.
If you could just tweak the fuck out of this pay scale, maybe I could afford to breathe.
The day ends with tweaking. Eighteen months into planning a trip with one of these multi-million-dollar scams to take some students to Costa Rica to complete sixteen hours of service, to have a purpose for their privilege, the rep from the company calls to inform me that no one else signed up for the service trip for that week, that we won’t be able to take that tour, that we will have to do the normal tour, pay a bit more, add an extra day, horseback ride, visit a national park, see the sea, be the fucking privileged bastards that we are, never making even the least bit of a positive mark on this cursed world.
“Are there any other options?” I ask after she has already said to me, “Was it your personal preference to do service or a school district requirement?”
I should have said school district requirement. I should have gathered up the words I have in my heart now, about how hard this has been to organize, how few students I’ve recruited, how my colleague can’t even come because we don’t have enough, how angry I am that after all this time, NOW, now I find out that I can’t even do the one thing I wanted to do? Teach English to small kids? Clean up a littered beach? Build a latrine? Something that makes a difference?
I should have tweaked my words, my never-present verbality incomparable to print, to thought, to hours later and all the tweaks I need to fuck this day.
During first period on a 90-minute-class block day, the few of us who had planning should have been feeling pumped. No students yet. No admin. No meetings. Just a moment to think about what we could do, what minds we could shape, what students would be there and what students we hoped wouldn’t.
And what did we discuss? A broken-down car, an Uber driver who saved the moment and makes more money than us in a day. Dog walking that pays double our salary. Being a trainer for Lowe’s. The emotional drain of being asked to please one hundred students, at least half of their parents, all of the admin, all of the district, all of the “failed” test scores, all of the data-driven nightmares, all in a day’s work.
It was a short discussion. We returned to our paperwork nightmare, our school district applications that freeze without warning on cheap PCs that break without warning, our plans that get interrupted by ten passes in a period, phone calls asking about missing students, requests for kids to attend assemblies, students who leave to pray, students who leave to get chips from the vending machines, students who won’t put their phones away, strings of emails five miles long trying to help the students who won’t help themselves, strings of want five miles long that stretch between breaks that, without, we’d utterly fail.
Could I tweak this? Could I just change five minutes of this lesson to ignore my Syrian refugee whose question (directly related to our reading, I promise) breaks me down to my core?
“Miss, why do white people think that they need guns? Who are they trying to kill?”
What academic vocabulary can I infuse into my white-supremacist rant, my explanation of three hundred years of slavery and colonization that we are just now taking the first steps to recover from, what words can I tweak to make her understand the weight of my response?
The weight of her question?
The weight of it all. The weight we carry with their questions, their presence… their absence.
My Honduran beauty, quiet as a field mouse, who ran away for ten days, scaring the shit out of all of us, her stepsister coming in teary-eyed and disheveled, whispering about the police, the older boyfriend, the fear. And when she miraculously reappeared after the break, I couldn’t do anything but wrap my arms around her, to tell her that everything was going to be OK, even though she knows I’m lying, that she has already flown across this border to live with a mostly-unknown father and stepmother, her mother back home working to her bones under the brutality of gang violence.
Could I tweak my interaction with this child, teach her how to take the SAT to the satisfaction of my school district?
Could I tweak this day, this or that news, this or that email, this or that career, to make all of it feel like it’s worth my time? My soul-bearing, heart-breaking time?
“If only I could write,” one of the teachers said this morning. “Maybe I could get some books published, make some money, get out of this.”
And she’s only five years in. Maybe she could find her words, find her magic, and escape the hell that we go through each day.
But then she wouldn’t have the stories. Those kids, they burn us and break us and… save us.
“This is my favorite class, Miss,” a boy with a 42% tells me after school, begging for work before the semester ends. “You are fun, and you make me work so hard.”
Not hard enough, I think. Could I have tweaked my thirty-person ELD class to differentiate for his specific needs?
I have a million messages from parents and students and admin and I shouldn’t be taking the time to write this post.
But no matter how much I try to tweak it, the work of a teacher never ends.
And no matter how much I try to tweak it, the love for teaching never ends.
And that is why I will rise tomorrow and face the same battles. The emails. The absences. The presence. The questions. The turns. The work.
With a little tweaking, maybe I can turn this work into a life. It’s only a matter of turning the wheel.
My Polo Ralph Lauren Purse
A few years ago, in search of something smaller to carry on road trips, I went to my typical “fashion” store, the Goodwill, and came across a perfectly small, just-big-enough-for-a-phone-and-some-gum, Polo Ralph Lauren purse. For $2. I popped it into my cart with my typical Goodwill assortment of work blouses and pants, and have been using it ever since. It fits perfectly into the console of my Pilot, can easily be crammed inside a carryon bag to bring onboard for a weekend getaway, and is light on my shoulder. It is the first, and last, “designer” purse I will ever own, and it is nothing special. It’s made from variations of polyester inside and out, though it has a reliable zipper. Compared to other, cheaper purses I’ve had over the years, I wouldn’t put my money on designer brands.
I suppose this purse, in retrospect, has now cost me 105 euros and two nights with very little sleep.
Because it was the purse, my Polo Ralph Lauren purse, that caught the eye of a petty thief as it sat blatantly (blatantly empty, I might add), on the passenger seat of our rental car while we carried seventy pounds of luggage into our latest Spanish apartment in Huelva.
Everyone has told me this. Passersby watching my two younger daughters scramble to lay on layers of packaging tape over the small triangle of broken glass at 20:30 on a Saturday night when we were supposed to go to dinner (it turns out dinner in Spain is an hour later anyway, so by the time we arrived in the restaurant at 21:00, we actually beat the long line of hungry customers that would soon make its way down the parkway). “¿Que pasó? ¿Ocurrió aquí? ¿Que tuviste adentro?¨ I heard the same questions when I texted Andrea, the Airbnb caretaker who assured me that this area is ¨muy tranquilo¨and nothing like this has ever happened before, and what did I have inside the car to grab a thief´s attention?
Where did we get the packaging tape at 20:15 on a Saturday night? A small detail of my travels in Spain: having lived here for a year has helped me tremendously with tiny bits of knowledge that are crucially important for moments like this—bazars, or more commonly called chinos—are Chinese-run everything stores that are even open on Sundays when the entirety of Huelva is camped out on the five-mile beach.
I speak enough Spanish to ask for tape, for scissors, to explain to the passersby that it was my Polo Ralph Lauren purse that the thief could see. I speak enough Spanish to explain the whole situation to Andrea, but I am lacking one word as to why I don’t have insurance that will cover this: what’s the difference between a lease and a rental?
I speak enough Spanish to text the owner of the apartment later and tell him the pilot light is out on the natural gas water heater, but even after he texts me photo-supported directions, I can’t seem to light the flame. He calls and coaches me through in such rapid-fire Castellano that I become flustered and am unable to explain what I have done wrong, so, alas, Andrea saves the day for me once again, walks over and lights the flame within seconds.
I speak enough Spanish to understand that on Sunday, everything is closed, and the only thing we can put our money towards are some tapas y postres, not window glass. Mythili and I make our way back to the bazar to find their version of Drano after I have spent half the morning trying to unclog the kitchen sink with a tiny and handy plunger kept under the sink because I can’t bear to make another report about something else gone wrong.
I speak enough Spanish to hear the word cerveza from the man walking up and down the beach with an ice cream cart, and I buy three because the sun is kind in the late afternoon, the beach is full of shells, and Mythili, the only child who would step out of the apartment with me today, is having great conversations with me about how much weddings cost and what types of jellyfish exist in the world and how many shells she thinks she can collect by the end of the week.
I speak just enough Spanish to explain to Jose, Andrea’s friend and owner of the ironically-named CarGlass shop (Andrea tripped over this title many times when she was explaining the location of the shop), that I have an arrendamiento (thank you Google translate), not a rental, that they wanted to charge me 3000 euros for insurance, and can I just pay for it myself?
I speak enough Spanish, with a few stops and bouts of “más despacio”, to sign the paperwork Jose lays out for me, to shell out another 105 euros, to praise the good lord that, once the thief broke the window and saw only a selfie stick inside my Polo Ralph Lauren purse, he decided not to take anything at all. Not even the purse. (He probably realized it was just crap polyester like everything else on this godforsaken planet).
But I don’t have the words, in any language, to describe how challenging traveling with my three girls has been this year. They have reached the tipping point of childhood exuberance melted into adolescent angst, and nothing, it seems, is quite what they want to do.
I have no other adult in the house to help me light that llama, no one to plunge the sink, no one to commiserate with me at 4:00 a.m. when my oldest wakes me by talking to her boyfriend back home, no one to wash up Riona’s puke from eating mussels before the sun rises on a Sunday morning. No one to stand by my side and say, “We didn’t fly across the world for you to sit in an apartment all day and night.”
That little triangle of broken glass has brought fear and doubt to a trip that is already plagued by fear and doubt. While at the beach, I tell Mythili I am afraid to go in the water with her and leave our stuff, because what if someone steals it? “Don’t turn into that, Mama. No one ever steals anything from you, as you always say, case in point with the purse.”
But I speak enough Spanish to understand Jose, when he arrives at his shop at 8:52 on a Monday morning and I am already waiting, come right up to me and say, “Ud. Es Karen, la amiga de Andrea?” Because yes. We are already friends.
I speak enough Spanish to read the bar-coded descriptions of historical points in Huelva as I pull them up on my phone, learning about Cristobal Colon, ship building, and industry while treating myself to pretty views of modern architecture, shady parks, and perfectly placed fountains.
I speak enough Spanish to navigate another day here, to order goat cheese with honey AND jam, to laugh with Mythili at the botched menu translation of squid meatballs as “squid balls.”
The words I need to find, words that could never fit in my car, my Huelvan apartment, my Polo Ralph Lauren purse, are the words of a lonely traveler, a neglected mother, one who just wanted one last glorious summer with her girls before they got too big, only to realize and accept, nearly home by now, that they are already too big.
I still have my Polo Ralph Lauren purse. My selfie stick. My gum. Jose is fixing my CarGlass, so by 18:00, the girls and I can pile in the Peugeot and arrive at the beach well before sunset and late enough to “not have to swim or get sandy.”
I still have the Spanish words I will need to navigate the next two weeks.
I still have the three girls with me, moody or not, and I know in my heart that they will one day look back at this crazy Spanish adventure and be grateful for it.
And no matter what fears and doubts have traveled with me across the world, I still have these views, and they are worth more than the price of broken glass, a Polo Ralph Lauren purse, a scam of an arrendamiento.
No thief or child could take them from me.
Beyond the Bars
To avoid pouring water down the drain, I spend ninety minutes washing dishes in two pans, running water out to my new mulch to dump, and putting everything away while Bruce researches home equity loans and Trump tax cuts that hurt, rather than help, our current situation.
Behind the bars of my security door, I take this picture of the sewer company’s progress replacing a portion of our main drain.
Behind the bars of this security door, I hide from the American Dream. The one that we are all promised and few of us ever attain. The one where we could afford to buy a house, afford to deal with that house’s expenses, afford to send our children to college or even pay off the loans we might still have from our own degrees.
I hide from the dream of all of my grandparents, a combination of immigrants and endlessly American, one grandfather with an eighth grade education, one with a high school diploma, who were able to raise large families and pay off mortgages well before retirement. On ONE income.
I hide from the audacity of insurance that we carry on our homes, our health, our lives. From the premiums we pay that won’t cover pre-existing conditions (like pregnancy!) or pre-existing problems on our properties (like drains), or pre-existing hope–from all the thousands and thousands of dollars we pour into these plans that leave us empty, behind bars, unable to operate a backhoe.
I hide from the for-sale houses in my neighborhood that are now so outrageously priced that my family, and none of the other families on my block, would ever be able to afford to buy the homes we stand in.
Behind the bars of my security door, I am as insecure as everyone in my generation. The generation that faces housing costs that are equivalent to more than fifty percent of what we earn in a month. The generation of debt that is impossible to avoid even with the best budget. The generation that has made the choice to bring children into this world only to constantly think: why would I bring children into this world? Children I feel inadequate to provide for, children who will face even higher college costs, children who will be straddled with debt for their entire adult lives?
Behind the bars, I cannot see the buyers of the $769,000 remodel on the next block. Where they come from. What jobs they have. What magical formula they applied for that allowed them to take a mortgage that costs more than what our two incomes bring home in a month.
Behind the bars, I hear the Spanish language spilling from the mouths of the workers who have to dig a hole in a yard on a holiday. With perfect efficiency, they have repaired a ten-foot section of pipe within two hours, and they will move on to the next family’s crisis, and the next, and the next, before going home to houses on the other side of town that they also likely can barely afford, because we all know that the $6000 we just paid for that pipe is lining the pockets of a white, male, English-only CEO.
Behind the bars, I live in my dream house, my four-bedroom, two-bathroom, beautiful-garden dream house that we waited seventeen years to purchase. I raise a family of three daughters whose pay may never match their male counterparts but, despite this, whose intelligence and candor will allow them to live the life of their dreams. I share my meals, my home, and my love with my husband who has managed our finances to such perfection that we have flawless credit, making an application for an equity loan for both our properties (because nothing can just happen to this house–both need new main drains), virtually seamless. We both work hard at our dream jobs–teaching and telecom–in order to make this picture perfect.
With the door open, before they rebury the dirt, I snap a picture of our pretty kitty hiding behind my glass of stress wine.
I sit on our paid-for leather recliner and feel the cool breeze of early summer and think about my students who have crossed the world to be a part of this American Dream, and how hard they work to make that dream possible, to learn English and learn how to navigate the complexities of our society that sometimes make us feel like we’re all going down the drain. I think of how hard my husband and I have worked to make this day possible–to give my girls a summer trip to Spain, a year in Spain, to see nearly all fifty states–because of how careful we have been with our money. I think of the health insurance that paid for most of my husband’s surgery and how my grandmother’s baby sister died of a simple infection in her mouth after tripping up on a wooden popsicle stick, all because they couldn’t afford a doctor.
With the door open, we host family friends who make us laugh until we cry, whose daughter will join us in Spain, whose presence makes us appreciate what we have surrounding us in life–a life filled with laughter, love, support.
With the door open and the Spanish-speaking workers gone, the Siberian iris frames my kitty, my pet, my perfect yard. I know that I have given so much to get to this picture, and I know I still have more to give. I have daughters who are lucky enough to have access to all the technology, diversity, and coursework that comes from an urban education, and who will enter their adult lives with an open-minded understanding of the world. I have a house that we can afford and enjoy without feeling like our money is going down the drain. I have a job that brings the global perspective to every choice I make in one of the most beautiful buildings our city has to offer. I have a marriage that has lasted from childhood to adulthood, with all the post-adolescent turmoil and trauma, all the sorrow and joy, that comes with making it work for twenty years.
With my door open, I wait for the American Dream. Somehow, some day, some way, I will see how it is both easy and difficult to achieve. If I would learn to always open the door and move beyond the bars, I would see that not everything is going down the drain. I would see the beauty in every choice, the brutality in every loss, and find a way to make a set of silver linings sweeter than a sip of stress wine.
I would be the wife, the teacher, the mother of that perfect picture. That perfect picture would be me.
Drifters for a Day
from desert to sea
in a day’s drive through one state
(miracles exist)
rainforests between
to prove heaven lives on earth
(nature is my god)
we found our daddy
after cherry shopping; lake;
beyond evergreens
a driftwood dinner
no one could have predicted
in another life
yet here we’ll find sleep
all together in one room
at earth’s clouded edge
Views from the Road
The beauty of the road is so much more than views. It is the elevation loss and gain that sneaks up on you as quickly as the road snakes its way along the Snake River.
It is the surprise of the desert that has made its rural-America mark in southeastern Oregon.
It is the spontaneity of stopping at state parks for a peek at history and scenery so breathtaking you feel you’ve stepped into a mini Grand Canyon.
It is the trail our ancestors walked upon that you place your weary soles on now, however twisted and stolen it may be. It is still a silent beauty resting behind a sleepy Americana town, waiting for rediscovery and firsthand learning for three young women.
It is the creek sparkling in the hotter-than-expected northwestern sun, and the quick dip that makes an afternoon sparkle just as brightly.
It is the curve that moves from summit to limitless landscapes, to the expansive end of the Oregon Trail, played out in a quilt of farm fields, and the hope they held for a better life.
The road brings beauty, and within this beauty lies everything you’d expect and wouldn’t expect: children bickering, bits and pieces of trash and clothing piled up in the backseats, state lines that bear no stoppable signs, audiobooks and downloaded movies, snapshots taken from a moving vehicle, trucks that hog both lanes, treeless mountains and endless vineyards, poverty and wealth found behind fences and up on winery hilltops.
The road brings more than views of tall pines, sagebrush-only molehills, and sleepy rivers. It brings us all a new world view where we search for ourselves and find ourselves in each other. Where children find joy in only their siblings’ company, where the road promises a pool at the end of the day and a reality check about small city poverty to remind us of what we have.
Can you see it from an airplane, from a train ride, from a walk down the block?
Never quite like the views you’ll find when you hit the open road. The views of nature, of civilization… of yourself.
You just need one set of keys, a whole lot of gumption, and a pair of soul-searching eyes, and you can find yourself a whole new world view.
Made in Colorado
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
Small Dreams
tiny house adieu
from our vacation
from reality
To Laugh Until I Cry. To Live Until I Die.
In the crook of early January, three weeks since seeing my students, on a cold wintry Saturday morning I shlep across town to make lesson plans with three other colleagues.
Later I will heat water for hot tea and curl in my recliner with a book, wishing I could write a novel as lyrically beautiful as Caramelo as my children wander in and out of rooms, in and out of our house and the neighbor’s, in and out of wanting to be near their dear old mom.
This after two attempts to jumpstart the old Hyundai whose lights I left on in our trek to the grandparents’ house last night.
This after listening to dating tales and math updates and wondering what it would really be like to be a single woman in modern America.
This after coloring intricate books with the girls in the brief time between our latest tech argument and the neighbor’s reemergence.
So is our Saturday, chicken defrosting in the sink, chores done and Echo playing my Pandora playlist to suit the color of my mood.
No dog to walk, no true purpose to the day other than making plans for a class no one really wants to teach.
What sits in the back of my mind is how easily I want to be able to relax. To have a deep and thought-provoking conversation that is justifiably, blood-burningly exciting. To laugh until I cry. To live until I die.
To take these lonely household moments and flip them over or back or somewhere else, when my children were small and my Chihuahua never left the warmth of my leg, when my marriage was young and everything we thought and did was about each other, not some game or book or phone or faraway friend.
In the crook of early January, holidays left out on the curb waiting for a second chance at life (mulch me till I can be reborn!), the cold of winter settles into my bones. The winter of this year, of my children’s childhood, of my marriage, nineteen years in the making.
Even with the beauty of the flakes that fall, their demise lies in slushy streets and icy black pavement, ready to trick any masterful driver, so used to winter but not its ugly, dry-grassed truth that lies beneath the surface.
In the crook of early January, I wait for the sun to rise high in the sky. For the snow to melt. For the tree to be taken. For the hollowness that hides inside this nook to break open in me a new way of looking at the world. For the bend of this season to straighten out into a road I can see, wide and clear and as questionless as a summer’s day.
But in the crook of January, there are no summer days. There are only questions.
Cloud Walking
clouds came in last night
Siri warned of “bad weather”
(she’s not a skier)
twenty new inches
of fresh powder, soft as silk,
came from those “bad” clouds
we floated ten runs
clouds above us, below us,
this heaven on earth
Step Write Up 