Category: reading

A second crop of hay lies cut   
and turned. Five gleaming crows   
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,   
and like midwives and undertakers   
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,   
parting before me like the Red Sea.   
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,   
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.   
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod   
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;   
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks   
over me. The days are bright   
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today   
for an hour, with my whole   
body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket …

In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.
I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.
~Jane Kenyon from “Three Songs at the End of Summer”

Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown—
different than locking a door,
or the shutdown we invented at the start
of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks
swept quickly between us, a sign
designed especially for school.

My son spent his first years a different kind of
locked up—an orphanage in Bangkok, where he didn’t
speak and they couldn’t sign. He came home, age four,
silent. We thought being here could open
doors. It has, of course. He’s learned so much
at the deaf school; the speech therapist calls it a Language
Explosion. I keep lists of the words he’s gathered:
vanilla, buckle, castle, stay. And
lockdown. He absorbs it like the rest. Now the schools
he builds with Magna-Tiles have lockdowns. I worry
in trying to give him keys, we’ve only changed the locks.

To lock down a deaf school, we use a special strobe.
When it flashes, we flip switches and sign through
darkness. The children know to stay
beneath the windows. Every five minutes a robot texts:
“Shelter in place is still in effect. Please await further
instructions.” Then we pull the fire alarm, a tactical move to
unsettle the shooter. Hearing people can’t
think with noise like that. A piercing thing
we don’t detect, to cover the sounds we make, the sounds
we don’t know we’re making.
~Sara Nović “Lockdown at the School for the Deaf”

The first day back to school now isn’t always the day after Labor Day as it was when I was growing up. Some students have been in classes for a couple weeks already, others started a few days ago to ease into the transition more gently. 

Some return to the routine this morning – school buses roar past our farm brimming with eager young faces and stuffed back packs amid a combination of excitement and anxiety.

I remember well that foreboding that accompanied a return to school — the strict schedule, the inflexible rules and the often harsh adjustment of social hierarchies and friend groups. Even as a good learner and obedient student, I was a square peg being pushed into a round hole when I returned to the classroom. The students who struggled academically and who pushed against the boundaries of rules must have felt even more so. We all felt alien and inadequate to the immense task before us to fit in with one another, allow teachers to structure and open our minds to new thoughts, and to become something and someone more than who we were before.

Growth is so very hard, our stretching so painful, the tug and pull of friendships stressful. And for the last two decades, there is the additional fear of lockdowns and active shooters.

I worked with students on an academic calendar for over 30 years, yet though I’m now retired, I still don’t sleep well in anticipation of all this day means.

So I take a deep breath on a foggy post-Labor Day morning and am immediately taken back to the anxieties and fears of a skinny little girl in a new home-made corduroy jumper and saddle shoes, waiting for the schoolbus on our drippy wooded country road.

She is still me — just buried deeply in the fog of who I became after all those years of schooling, hidden somewhere under all the piled-on layers of learning and growing and hurting and stretching — I do remember her well.

Like every student starting a new adventure today,
we could all use a hug.

Lo! I am come to autumn,
   When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
   The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
   Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
   Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
   Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
   The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
   Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
   When all the leaves are gold.
~G.K. Chesterton “Gold Leaves”