Situational awareness gets slippery

Sometimes in the midst of waking up in the morning I can't remember where I am: in Columbus taking care of my sick son or at home tending students and chickens? I keep my eyes shut and listen for clues, reach into memory to recall which bed I crawled into last night.

Heat pump screeching to a stop? Home. Helicopters overhead? Columbus.

Warm slippers near the bed? Home. Cold floor and no slippers? Columbus.

What did I eat for supper yesterday? Homemade beef and noodles means Columbus, because chemotherapy wrecked my son's appetite and killed his taste buds so I cook what he craves, and I don't even look at the price tags when I buy the last package of stew beef at the grocery store but when the bill for a few bags of essential items tops $100, I remind myself that keeping my son nourished is worth every penny.

But if last night's supper consisted of fast food ordered at a drive-through where the attendant did not understand what I meant when I asked what non-caffeinated drinks were available and he suggested sweet tea--well, I must be at home. If suppertime falls in the middle of that long drive and I know there's nothing much to eat in the pantry, then I'll settle for a burger and fries and some lemonade, because caffeine in the evening will keep me up all night--and then I drive off into the darkness without realizing that they haven't even given me a straw.

But I sleep well enough and then wake in the morning and wonder where I am. Rooster crowing? Home. Son gagging down a thousand fat pills? Columbus. 

No sign of light peeping through the heavy curtains? Home. Streetlights making the thin white curtains glow? Columbus. 

Husband making me a nice pot of my favorite loose leaf chai? In my dreams. 

At home I miss my son and in Columbus I miss my warm house but in both places I miss my husband, since we're rarely in the same place at the same time.

I asked my son this weekend what he misses most since he started this medical sojourn, and he had to think about it. I thought he'd say friends, work, church, but no. I miss my bike, he said, and skiing. 

He returned from his ski trip to Banff in March just a few days before he was life-flighted to The James, and it's unlikely that he'll do any skiing this winter. He went for a few bike rides over the summer but not since the bone marrow transplant. The other day he walked with me to see the bison grazing on restored prairie land at Battelle Darby Creek Metropark--yes, bison thriving just outside the city!--but it was a short walk with a bench to rest on halfway through and he had to lie down when we got back to the duplex.

In Columbus. 

Empty house where my voice echoes down the hallway? Home. Duplex where I am always cold, but helping my son recover warms my heart? Columbus. 

Some days I may be confused about where I am, but knowing why I'm there makes the confusion more bearable.

 

Friday poetry challenge: Traffic jams

I made it one block from my office yesterday afternoon before things started going off the rails. By things I mean one great big tourist bus, and by going off the rails I mean stalling in the middle of a busy intersection a block from my office and not being able to move out of the way. 

So I sat through green lights, one two three four, before I found a way to ease around the bus right into oncoming traffic. Home free! But no: my interminable drive to Columbus included a long stretch locked in a line of cars crawling behind a school bus that kept stopping to offload passengers, a detour around stopped traffic on the Interstate, and a 10-mile stretch of gridlocked highway that took me 20 minutes to navigate. 

I admit that I am not a great city driver. I like to drive but city driving makes me crazy, and the constant noise hurts my brain. At the Hyatt we couldn't get away from the constant traffic sounds on the nearby highway, but I thought things would be quieter at the duplex my son is renting. So okay, very little traffic noise here, but apparently we're on the flight path for the airport so the traffic noise comes from above. I don't know how many planes and helicopters passed overhead during last night's wonderful lasagna dinner, but enough to be noticeable.

I suppose I'll get used to it. Years ago in grad school when we lived in a mobile home next to a busy railroad track, I somehow learned to sleep through the trains that sounded like they were bursting right through my bedroom door in the middle of the night. A cozy duplex in a quiet neighborhood is just what my son needs as he recovers from frequent blood tests, infusions, and physical therapy, so I'm not complaining, but I look forward to eventually saying goodbye to the city and good riddance to all the traffic. Who are all these people and where are they going in such a rush--and why can't they get out of my way? 

City cars

and city bus,

city traffic--

why such fuss?

Stop and go

and honk and weave,

go and stop

and stop. Achieve

the target,

reach the goal.

(City traffic

jams my soul.)

Now how about you? Merge into the poetry lane and make some noise.

Welcome to Nap-vember

April may be the cruelest month but November must be the tiredest. I looked out over my 11:00 class yesterday and wanted to dismiss my students to take naps, but they don't have time for naps because they have projects and papers and meetings and job interviews. And I don't have time for naps either, which is a problem since I'm still not sleeping most nights.  Okay, I sleep well enough, but I wake up at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. and can't get back to sleep. But at least I can see something beautiful outside my window when the sun comes up.

As much as the cool, damp weather makes me want to sleep all day, today is a non-napping day. I'll move from administrative claptrap to grading to teaching and then cheer on my students who are sharing their creative writing at our departmental poetry reading at noon, and then I get to drive home, check on the chickens and gather eggs, and drive to Columbus to spend the weekend with my son, lasagna in hand.

A colleague baked the lasagna, a woman who endured breast cancer treatment a few years ago and knows how important self-care can be. With no one but me at home and no energy at the end of the day, I've been avoiding cooking supper entirely. Last night I fried a few fresh eggs for supper, but one evening this week I was so exhausted at the end of the day that the only thing I could manage for supper was sliced apples dipped in peanut butter. Yes, I'm eating like a toddler, but I'm too tired to do much else--which is why I especially appreciate this gift of lasagna. It will feed me and my hungry men and it feels like love. 

What about tomorrow's classes? I won't be there, but they're covered: a colleague is proctoring an in-class essay at 9:00, and my 11:00 students will engage in an online discussion. I could have waited until tomorrow afternoon to drive to Columbus, but here's the thing: since we started this tag-team caregiving nearly three weeks ago, my husband and I haven't spent more than 30 minutes in the same county, much less the same room or the same bed. Leaving today means I can spend quality time with my husband before I forget what he looks like. 

So I will work hard and drive hard and arrive in Columbus bearing lasagna, perhaps a bit exhausted but surrounded by people I love. And tomorrow I can rest. I have a pretty long to-do list, but I intend to put the word nap right at the top. 

 

The view out my back window first thing this morning.

 

Up to my eyeballs in student drafts

At least no one's making me read Dune, I tell myself as I read my capstone students' drafts. The capstone class grounds students in a particular body of literary theory and then asks them to apply that theory to a work of their choice, and once years ago a student decided to analyze something or other about Dune, which I had read for a grad school pop culture class and loathed deeply. But I couldn't give the student helpful feedback on the basis of dimly remembered loathing, so I read it again in preparation for reading his draft. I loathed it just as much the second time through.

This time my students read a whole mess of articles about the ethics of comedy and several are examining works I know well and admire (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pride and Prejudice). One is analyzing the comic distance created by the narrator's sarcasm in The Goldfinch, which I had not read before this semester. It's something like 600 pages long. Good thing I had all those spare hours while convalescing from surgery. Donna Tartt filled that long quiet week with a raucous voice telling a compelling story. I'm glad I read it, but if I'd known in advance, I could have taken that honking big book at a more leisurely pace.

My capstone students have worked their way through mastering the theoretical concepts, doing the research, writing annotated bibliographies, and writing up lit reviews and close readings, and now it's time to bring it all together into coherent drafts that I'll spend the rest of the week reading. A student emailed over the weekend and asked if it was okay if her draft was more than 3000 words long, and what could I say? Sure, she'll have to condense when she does the formal presentation, but I'd rather see a student condense a too-long paper into the most interesting elements than try to stretch a too-short paper to fill the time. 

At this point, time is at a premium. Now that the drafts are done, my students will have to transform them into presentations and then revise into scholarly articles of publishable quality, an aspiration goal that many students don't believe they'll ever reach. But some do, and even an uneven effort to reach that goal often results in really terrific papers. Which is a good thing, because I'll be spending the rest of my week reading and responding to those drafts. Rewarding, yes, but that's a lot of words requiring my full attention. 

Which is why I'm especially thankful that none of them take me back to Dune. 

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: In celebration of students

I'd like to give myself some credit for brilliant pedagogy, but really it was a last-minute attempt to fix holes in a couple of syllabi that led me to assign student presentations in all my classes this semester. At the time I had no idea how much I would need those presentations and how beautifully my students would perform.

The English capstone class, of course, always culminates in a major paper and presentation attended by the entire department, and my senior English majors are well on their way toward submitting their drafts next week so they can present their papers next month. Nothing new here.

But I don't always assign presentations in other literature classes and I've never before assigned them in the Concepts of Nature class. Nevertheless I'll be spending the next week sitting in a student desk while my students try to persuade us all to care about specific problems related to nature. 

Several factors led me to assign presentations in that class: its small size made presentations feasible; I'd dropped a major reading assignment that left a week's gap in the syllabus; and only three of the students are English majors while the rest are mostly STEM students who thought studying nature in literature would be a fun way to fulfill a General Education requirement. I wanted to challenge those students to make connections between literature and current events.

The assignment is simple: inform classmates about a specific problem related to nature and explain how two of our class readings help us understand or respond to the problem. We spent a class session researching reliable sources on their topics and another drafting thesis statements and outlines, and from what I've seen, it looks like we're going to learn an awful lot about endangered species and deforestation and microplastics in drinking water. How will they bring together serious scientific research and, perhaps, poetry? I'm looking forward to finding out. 

The African American Literature class posed a different kind of problem: a large class and too many reading assignments, with no room on the syllabus for individual presentations. So instead I put the students in pairs and assigned them to lead discussion on specific authors. They provide a little context about the author and the work, and then they have to engage their classmates in discussion of the assigned readings for at least 20 minutes. Most of them take the whole hour--and do a fabulous job. They put us in groups, assign discussion questions, or make us get up and walk around and write things on newsprint. 

Just this week a pair of students engaged the entire class in a discussion of the meaning of art. We'd read Alice Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which examines the difficulty of finding time and space to create art under oppressive conditions. It's a serious and joyful essay and the students engaged in serious and joyful discussion. A few weeks ago when we were discussing Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, the student discussion leaders gave each group a major character in the play and then set the groups debating about which of the characters most deserved the inheritance at the center of the plot. It was a lively debate demonstrating great depth of insight and nuance.

Best of all, though, all I had to do was sit there and let it happen.

Given everything that's been happening outside of class this semester--the flooding, the surgery, the repeated trips to Columbus to tend to my cancer-ridden son--I am exhausted all the time. I reserve my best energy for teaching, but some days it's all I can do to stand there and toss out coherent questions or engaging activities. Never have I been more grateful for regular opportunities to sit and listen and observe while my students take the helm. 

And they have done well. Seeing my students grab hold of ideas and make them sing makes me even more certain that it's time to retire. I've had my chance to lead the dance; time to get out of the way and let others take over.

In the Alice Walker discussion, we came to the conclusion that the process of exercising creativity is important even if the product is overlooked or forgotten, so I'm going to engage in that process and hope that others will follow my lead:

I've had my chance to lead the dance
so now I'll step aside
to let my students join their hands
to swing and swirl and glide
through poems and stories, essays too,
debates, deliberations.
They lead so well. This dance is swell!
Come join the celebration!

Come on, now--toss down some lines in celebration of students.

Not quite up to scratch

No power in my building when I arrived this morning, no light no heat no tech, but everything in the building capable of beeping was raising a racket. I sat in my dark office resting my eyes and trying not to think about how my students were supposed to give presentations in the absence of electricity. 

But the power came back on, thankfully. Still no heat, though--that'll take some more repairs. And the classroom computer took a full eight minutes to boot up and then Canvas demanded dual authentication but I had left my phone in my office so I had to run and fetch it to make the tech work. Good thing I'd arrived at the classroom early!

No rooster crowing when I left for work this morning, which alarmed me. I'd spent much of yesterday driving to Columbus and back and so had to feel my way down to the chicken coop well after dark, but the flashlight revealed no eggs at all. Normally they lay eight to twelve eggs each day, but their first full day in the new coop resulted in six. Yesterday was the second day, and no matter how carefully I search all the nooks and crannies, I found not a single egg. And so when there was no crowing this morning, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong.

No eggs today either, and I checked in the daylight just to be sure I wasn't missing anything. The resident chicken fancier says the hens are probably just stressed out from the big move, but I don't know what I can do to calm them down since I'm not exactly a paragon of calm myself at the moment. I took some leftover pancakes down to the coop and tossed out chunks while speaking calmly to the chickens about eggs and scratch grains and nest boxes. Maybe tomorrow I'll find eggs. Or maybe they're withholding eggs until their regular minder returns from Columbus.

Where I went yesterday to meet with the medical oncologist, who confirmed that chemotherapy is not called for in my situation (hurrah!) but that I'll need to take estrogen blockers for the foreseeable future since the tumor they removed is the type that thrives on estrogen. Fine, whatever. Anything to avoid chemo. 

But the reason I was so late returning from Columbus was that every medical professional in a thirty-block radius felt the need to take a look at my rash. 

I have a rash. A very itchy, very red rash, which was of concern to the oncologists because it's located right next to my surgical incisions. Everyone wanted to see it, especially when it became clear that the rash was visible on every speck of skin that my bra had touched. Contact dermatitis, they said. Apparently I am allergic to my underwear. 

So many questions! Is it a new bra? (No.) Has it ever caused me to break out in a rash before? (No.) Have we changed laundry detergent recently? (No.) Have I changed anything about my normal household routine? (Well, I've been taking care of chickens, but how that's relevant to a bra-shaped rash is beyond me.) What a mystery!

After all the rash-related delays, I was so late getting home that I didn't even bother stopping at the pharmacy to pick up the ointment they'd prescribed, which was just as well because the pharmacy texted me this morning to say the medication is out of stock. By the time it arrives, the rash will be gone.

No light, no heat, no tech, no eggs, no crowing, no chemo, no answers, no ointment--I've got plenty of nothing, but what I have is a rash that itches so constantly that it requires every ounce of willpower I possess to prevent myself from tearing off what's left of my breasts. 

But I am calm. Breathing deeply, thinking soothing thoughts, trying not to scratch. Don't let me get hold of a garden claw.

Because I don't know enough to know what I don't know

If you can handle teaching first-year students for all those years, you can handle a few chickens, said my colleague, and I said, Sure, I'll just stand in the middle of the flock and explain the function of the semicolon. 

After successfully completing my first weekend in Columbus as official caregiver to my son, I'd been obsessing about making the shift to caregiving for chickens. I'd heard a rooster crowing as I left the house this morning and I was relieved to have aural evidence that at least one of the chickens had survived the flock's first night in the new coop. Hobbling down the hill to the coop on my bum knee isn't easy, but my primary concern about being in charge of the chickens is that something horrible will happen to them while my husband's in Columbus and it will be All My Fault.

Nothing about this situation is my fault, really. It's not my fault than my son and I both got cancer in the same year or that he needs constant caregiving as he recovers from his bone marrow transplant or that I had already submitted my retirement date before his diagnosis so that I'm committed to teaching until the beginning of December or that repeated flooding made the meadow too mushy to allow delivery of the new coop or that there was a glitch in getting the electricity hooked up so that the chickens couldn't be moved to their new digs until Sunday afternoon.

And it wasn't my fault that I was in Columbus waiting for my husband to arrive to take his caregiving shift while he was trying to encourage a few stubborn fowl beasts to make the move. Several of them resisted vociferously, including one especially obstreperous guinea. (The Especially Obstreperous Guinea: garage band or twee tavern?) And it wasn't my fault that he arrived in Columbus much later than expected so that I arrived home hours later in the pitch darkness too exhausted to check on the birds.

I took it on faith that the chickens were doing fine, but how would I know? Thanks to automatic feed-and-water systems, they don't need me to check in constantly, but I can't stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong while I'm not paying attention. Raccoons, for instance. The resident chicken fancier insists that the doorknob in the coop is set too high for raccoons to reach, but I've seen raccoons climb a birdfeeder pole and disassemble an elaborate feeder into its constituent parts, so I never underestimate the abilities of a raccoon. 

And even if the doorknob is too high for raccoons, what about bears? Bears have been sighted not 10 miles from our property, and what's to stop them from reaching the doorknob or crashing through the window? Do bears even care about chickens? Again, how would I know?

Aside from predators, I wonder what stupid thing I'll do just because I didn't grow up raising chickens as my husband did. What ignorant act could result in mass destruction of chickens and a few obstreperous guineas? I don't know enough about chickens to know how much I don't know.

Taking care of my son requires following directions: make sure he takes his umpteen bazillion pills; take his temperature, watch for alarming symptoms, and flush the central line every day; change his dressing once a week; make sure he eats properly and drinks plenty of fluids and gets a little regular exercise. And if I mess up, the nurse line at the hospital is staffed 24 hours a day with highly competent people eager to answer questions, even ignorant ones. 

Where is my 24-hour chicken help line? If such a thing exists, I wouldn't even know what to ask aside from Do these chickens look okay to you? When I finally got down to the coop after work today, I found no eggs in the nesting boxes and six eggs laid in a neat depression they'd made in the straw in one corner of the coop. How do I make them lay in the nesting boxes? Six isn't many--where are the others? Were they too stressed out to lay eggs?

I asked them nicely but they're not saying. All I hear from them is clucking and crowing and I have no way to interpret what it all means.

I love to see sunshine through the fall leaves