Today I was delighted to spend a portion of my morning outside making Stone Soup with very young chefs. Cooking al fresco is fraught with benefits; although the aroma is lost to the atmosphere because of the venue, the trade off is the sun not only shines on your Vitamin D-deprived-post-winter face, it also cooks the soup!
Conveniently, we found just what we needed at the base of a nearby tree in a sunny field: two pots, a couple jugs of water, and all the ingredients we could find.
Here is the recipe:
Put the pots directly on the ground.
Pour in cups and cups of water until you don’t feel like doing that anymore.
Wander around the periphery looking for ingredients.
When something interesting catches your eye, throw it into the medley and mix vigorously with a nearby stick.
Pinecones make great carrots. Dried sedum sprigs are broccoli spears, and what about snapped-off twigs? Perfect celery sticks!
Fold in loose mud to thicken, garnish with fistfuls of grass and clover, and stir liberally – if not frantically – with a stick.
Plunge your finger or entire fist in to see if it is warm. It is! The sun is working its magic the whole time you are busy cooking. Run around a bit more while the warming orb continues to meld the flavorful ingredients together.
When the soup is done, give it one more vigorous stir and pour it into a nearby puddle for effect.
It was a day that packed a lot of living into it – a runaway train of urgent circumstance and no time. Yesterday we tore through reams of copy paper spouting from nearly over-heating copiers, preparing for a month of no school. We swirled through too few hours, some with bated breath, others near hyperventilation. In the end, we handed over our charges to dubious – somewhat tentative families, bolstering both with confidence about the unfamiliar partnership that lie ahead. It is likely that we all breathed a collective exhale when the last child waved good-bye for a month.
Having each been in buildings teeming with life all day, my husband and I willingly risked dinner at the local pub – the threat there minimal compared to the daily dousing of germs in our classrooms. We descended underground on deeply worn slate steps to the local rathskeller, centuries old – a warm, cozy cave. Coolness gave way to warm-subterranean lighting, a heavy low-beamed ceiling, and crusty stone walls corralling chattering families around tables, sharing meals. Neighborhood characters at the bar dotted the foreground, enjoying hot meals in a place where you can know everyone or no one, and still be a part of it.
The pace and urgency of the day slid off my shoulders and dropped to the floor as we set at a side table near the wine cages and ordered meal and drinks. I am always proud to be a teacher, but today particularly so. We were handed a tall order, and we did what we needed to do. Faculty, staff, and administration prepared and outfitted over 300 primary grade students for a month of distance learning in 24 hours, and we did it well. Our community looked to us to take charge and make them feel okay about what was about to happen, and we did just that. I am privileged to be a part of what happened yesterday in my school and in my profession. We made a stressful circumstance possible, manageable, and positive.
Teaching is so many things. Yesterday, teaching was ministry.
When I can’t take time to get to the studio, I roll out on the living room floor. The colorful strip of rug between the coffee table and the fireplace is room for my mat, two blocks, a little pillow, and the green afghan crocheted by my mom. If the timing is right morning sun slants through the blinds just so, scattering slices onto my space – warm beams of yellow.
Ollie invariably wanders in to see what I am doing, but after all these years – he probably knows. He waits while I unfurl purple and settles onto one end of the mat just about the time I say, “Ready for yoga, Ollie?” I’m not sure if he is excited, but he seems somewhat duty-bound, nonetheless. Sedentary-with-age and thirty pounds of cockapoo, he doesn’t take up much room, so I start my practice opposite him on the other end, eventually swooping and dipping enough for him to muster energy to move toward a less disrupted spot on the couch.
Yesterday he claimed his parcel of mat for the entire practice, nonplussed by the lunging, flailing, and pranayama-ing beside him. Eventually I scooched way forward, my calves and ankles extending beyond the mat edge to respect his space for community shavasana. I lay back and covered up with the soft throw. I felt my mom around me, and Ollie’s fur grazing the top of my head, my length stretched out long, his curled upon itself.
Gentle snores metrinom-ed my breath and were the rhythm of my rest.
I’ll admit – I once used a credit card to scoop Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch out of the carton so I could eat it in the car. I have commandeered packaging twine to tie back curtains and scotch tape and staples to hold up a droopy hemline when time prevented needle and thread.
I’ve garnered milk crates for book shelves, dabbed White-Out on spots spoiling a white shirt, replaced grungy car mats with fluffy bathroom rugs, and pushed shish-kabob skewers into the ground for plant stakes, hammering them home with a nearby rock.
I fill in scratch marks on our black stove with a Sharpie, and when the brown veneer wears off my boot heels, they get darkened with the Sharpie marker, too.
I’m not sure it started with the credit card spoon, but over the years pseudo-substitutions have done the job, and no one is the wiser – until now.
My bird bath is an aluminum garbage can lid upturned on a wrought iron pedestal, our beta fish bowl is a big flower vase, and the dog gate for the front porch is an old garden trellis.
Do other people do this too – use things for other things?
My friend Beth once used Krazy Glue to secure her false tooth in a pinch. She is not with me anymore, and it was not the Krazy Glue that did her in, but I think I would draw the line on that one. She was always more of a risk taker than me.
Using things for other things.
I’m even using other things now – for this blog!
Is it resourcefulness or desperation?
Okay, the Ben and Jerry’s was clear desperation, but the other things?
Years ago I read a book in which the author described his sunny grandmother like this: if her hair were on fire, she would lilt: “At least we have light to read by!”
Although outlandish in its extremity, the possibility of such a perspective (somewhat tempered) has stayed with me.
A simple choice of lens – orientation may edify or plunder a life.
To choose anger when the dishwasher breaks (it’s broken – the door fell off last week), or to be happy that I have plates to wash and food to dirty them. Why not gratitude?
To curse the early rising hour that the work week demands, or revel in a job that provides me with resources and community beyond most. Why not appreciation?
To lament my non-existent lawn, or celebrate the sustainable biodiversity in the weeds and critters that are home there. Why not acceptance?
To complain about messy family members, or take pause at the unbearable thought of losing them? Why not love?
To be annoyed at the slow-mover in front of me, or consider the unseen challenges they grapple with. Why not compassion?
To see goodness in me and be slower to find fault there, too. Why not kindness?
Life lets us choose how we assimilate challenges into our personhood.
A choice, a reaction, a response can
burden or lighten.
And if the light happens to be coming from your flaming hair
there’s always the wig
that is the best version of the hair you always wanted.
My students struggle with writing more than most, partly because talking is a prerequisite and talking is hard. Risking a raised hand, asking a question aloud, voicing an emotion, retelling anything, or engaging in the confusing reciprocity of conversation are hefty challenges. Despite the lively occupants, my classroom is quiet – especially in September – for weeks and weeks. These are not first and second graders that are bursting at the seams to share news. In fact, morning circle is painfully short and silent.
Then we discovered puzzles.
This past summer, my principal was kind enough to allow me a move from a tiny room to the vacated classroom next door – a real gift of space for a resource room program. Along with the new expanse came my new square table and four chairs – a perfect puzzle spot.
I bought a 300 piece jigsaw of irresistible neon-colored doughnuts and spread it out in great anticipation, excited for the kids to tackle it during brain break.
It sat for two weeks, untouched.
Disappointed, I shoveled the array back into the box, and spread out an old 100 piece dog-eared challenge of a bulldozer from years ago, fewer and larger pieces – less daunting. I waited and watched to see what would happen.
They took to it the next day; it was complete within the week.
Ah, ha! I thought.
The following morning I put the 300 piece doughnut version back out again. Eager bodies clambered around the table with buoyed confidence and never looked back.
Scaffolding at its best!
Since that inaugural 100 piecer last September, my students have completed three 300 count cut-ups, one 400, and one 500 piece contest. Their average is about one a month, and they can’t seem to get enough. Cheers erupt when the last parcel is set in place, and then pleas to begin a new one the very next day. Several of our completed favorites are on display outside our classroom, and even our parents have begun to donate new exploits to our class.
The children think it is all about the puzzle, and it is – partly. Assembly requires a myriad of skills: visual scanning and ground/foreground discrimination, spacial awareness, fine motor dexterity, stamina, patience, delayed gratification, and more. But to me, this time is not really about puzzle – ing.
It is about language.
When children gather at that table, the classroom drops away, the teacher fades to background and they are just there, bent on common goal and moving toward something together, engaged in community and friendship, unwittingly and quite unknowingly.
They converse. They quibble. They question. They joke. They laugh. They ask. They challenge. They argue. They confide. They talk – with each other.
Their easy voices are music to my ears.
We now know that she loves her tap lessons Monday after school, and he is packing up to move to a new house next month, but thankfully still in town. She has a loose tooth, and someone else is testing for his purple belt on Saturday. Baseball practice starts this weekend, and her grandparents live in Florida. The dog has to have a cone on its head for ten more days.
And just like that, morning circle isn’t quiet anymore.
Our dog provides me with a wonderful excuse every morning to get outside, which is where I’d almost always rather be. We pad downstairs while the house is still dark and the rest of the family is asleep. I let him out for a preliminary snuffle around the yard, do a quick wash and brush, pull on my jacket, step into my boots and join him. This time of year a 6:30 a.m. walk gives us enough light to see while offering the possibility of a remnant moon to the west and soft gray lightness rising in the east.
So worth it, right there.
My husband says he is useless without his morning shower but I’d have to say for me it’s all outside. These days, the dog and I walk our usual walk because the earth lies mostly dormant in the light grasp of faded winter. Soon enough we’ll spend more time in the yard – cleaning up detritus and getting the garden going; our forays will be less leisurely and more purposeful then. Whatever the reason, it’s good to have one to get out there and do something – anything. When it’s time to head back in, it’s with a sense of gratitude for time well spent.
My roots may be Irish and Polish, but my roots before time are of the planet. It nourishes me, sustains me, grounds me. We share the same percentage of salt water, and my breath and the seas share the same rhythm in the ebb and flow of air and ocean waves.
Food for mind, body, spirit is just beyond the threshold for the taking.
It has been under my bed gathering dust for years. Close to two decades. The black case layered with dust, the nylon strap long replaced with a length of twine that defies time and physics with its tenuous hold on the dingy vessel. When released, three silver buckles flip up to reveal worn rust-brown velvet cradling two items inside: my old violin and my bow.
I played through elementary school but fell off when orchestra practice meant getting to school early in junior high and high school. Nonetheless, I kept a few prized music books and dragged them and it along with me through life, across the years, three states, and then overseas, playing only occasionally.
For my birthday last year, my husband had it completely refurbished. New wood polish, new strings, a bridge, tuning keys, chin rest, rosin, and a new bow. The boss case is a cool lime green now and the fiddle rests there in great comfort and style, wholly protected, and deserving of the upgrade.
My new pitch pipe came in the mail just the other day. With it I can tune the violin accurately enough to get on with playing. Familiar tunes run through my head like old friends: Minuets of assorted numbers, Etude, Gavotte. Like companions I haven’t seen in ages, they are rustier and more compromised than I expected, but of great comfort, and I appreciate their surrounding me with familiarity and memories of many hours spent together – sharing time.
Even though I didn’t play all that much, I kept it near me wherever I went – that violin. It seems strange to have done that – dragged it around like I did – but when I think about why, I think I know. Music has always been a better part of me, so my unwillingness to leave it behind seems fitting.
Just Sifting 