A different type of classroom

Teaching in the middle of July--outdoors, in whatever weather, for an unknown number of students of various ages and abilities? Sure, sign me up. 

It sounded like a fabulous idea a few months ago when the director of the local Master Naturalist Program asked me to teach a three-hour elective on Nature Writing for people seeking to become certified Master Naturalists. I can teach nature writing with my eyes shut and both hands tied behind my back, I told myself, but it'll be better if I prepare. So here I sit in my office on a hot July day putting together activities and discussion questions for--well I don't know who these people are. Who signs up to take this kind of class? The classroom could be full of curious retirees, young professionals trying to broaden their skills, or bored teens whose parents are forcing them to attend something educational. How do I engage a wildly mixed group?

And when I say classroom, I mean outdoor space with gazebo and lawn chairs. Unless it's raining, in which case we go inside and I figure out how to adapt my exercises to the indoor environment. How do I get them to closely observe nature if we're sheltering from a thunderstorm? Oh, maybe we can observe the thunderstorm....

I'm planning to focus on observation skills, starting with a description of the Claude glass, that handy-dandy accessory so beloved of 18th- and 19th-century nature lovers. Nature observed directly can be unruly, poorly composed, overwhelming to our refined senses, so the trendy traveler carried a Claude glass, a small, darkened hand-held mirror. Viewers would stand with their backs to the sublime scenery and observe its reflection in the mirror, flattened and framed and filtered until it resembled a refined piece of art. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, but we'd prefer to keep them at a safe distance.

Today our cell phones take the place of Claude glasses, offering an instant image of the natural world, framed and filtered and flattened so we can carry it around easily in our pockets. But are we really seeing what's out there? How can we get an unmediated image of nature?

When we first moved to the woods, I thought it would take forever to identify all the types of birds that visited our feeders. I keep a bird book next to the big front window, and I still spend time trying to distinguish between, say, varieties of sparrows, or similar types of woodpeckers. The downy and hairy woodpecker look nearly identical, but the hairy is bigger and has a longer beak--longer both in absolute terms and in relation to its head size. To get to the point that I can tell the difference instantly requires time and attention to details and the willingness to make mistakes 

These days people can just snap a photo of a bird, post it on social media, and ask for an identification. It's a quick and easy way to learn the name of the bird, but knowing the name is not knowing the bird. To know the bird, you have to watch it, not just for a moment but over time, repeatedly, directly, persistently, seeing it in all its behaviors and shades.

This is the kind of observation I'm planning to promote at my nature writing class. I have these people, whoever they are, for three hours on a Saturday afternoon when maybe they'd rather be kayaking. How much can we really accomplish in that length of time? I guess I'm getting ready to find out. 

 

Friday poetry challenge: It's not about the Vikings

We stumbled upon the Indian pipes just past the Viking encampment and immediately tried to protect them--the plants, not the Vikings. 

You wouldn't expect to encounter Vikings deep in the Hocking Hills, but the absence of longboats suggests that these weren't real Vikings. If you want to encounter grown people dressed the way they imagine Vikings might have dressed and living in tents in the woods for a weekend in July, then stroll through the Viking encampment, buy some sourdough bread, look at some taxidermied foxes, and try your hand at tossing a hatchet at a target--at no charge.

We hadn't driven 90 minutes through intermittent rain just to see a Viking encampment, but the parking area for Lilyfest was Viking-adjacent, so we dutifully walked past the Vikings' tents and through thick woods to enter the annual art and nature festival at Bishop Educational Gardens. When we saw Indian pipes growing smack-dab in the middle of the trail, my husband stuck a stick in the dirt to mark the spot so they wouldn't get trampled. A futile gesture: a few hours later when we left there was no sign of the stick or the Indian pipes. We saw some clumps growing in the woods nearby, but you can't expect hordes of beauty-starved visitors to notice tiny delicate plants in the middle of a trail through dark woods.

It's been a few years since my last visit to Lilyfest but it was just as wonderful as I'd remembered. The rain kept the crowd thin and made photography difficult but also provided a welcome respite from oppressive heat and humidity. We wandered the gardens, bought some lilies to plant at home, and sat beneath the trees eating lunch while a young girl nearby played bluegrass tunes on a fiddle. 

You never know what you might find among the gardens: gorgeous orange lilies on one side of the path, sinuous glass sculpture on the other, a butterfly flitting between them, and always music wafting through the air. Despite the presence of vendors, visitors, and Vikings, it feels like a place of peace and poetry. To celebrate small but intense pleasures, let's try some haiku:

Lilies, lotuses, 
sinuous glass: nature, art,
and music bring peace.

Indian pipes, before the crowds trampled them

At the lotus pond. I love the subtle colors.

They seem startled to see us. 

I love this cat hanging from a tree.

Dumb luck

Lucky guy, the aide said as he handed my son a chicken salad sandwich and a bag of chips. 

Lucky? A luckier person would have avoided lymphoma entirely, but I guess luck is relative. If you get out of bed just after 4 a.m., eat a quick breakfast and then vomit it all back up again before being driven two hours to the James cancer hospital, and if you survive the first two (of four) annoying procedures before 11 a.m., and if you then realize that you're feeling a bit peckish and ask the aide for a bite to eat before starting chemotherapy, and if the aide then delivers a chicken salad sandwich and your favorite brand of chips, that's some kind of luck! We have to take our victories where we find them.

In the four months since my son was diagnosed I have been lucky enough to avoid driving duty on four-procedure days, but yesterday I drew the short straw. Blood work, chest x-ray, two kinds of chemo, lumbar puncture--a scenic tour of hospital procedure rooms and a very long day. 

Twice my husband has been the designated driver on multi-procedure days that have stretched beyond twelve hours, but then he is also better equipped to entertain himself for long periods at the hospital. By the time he's ready to leave, he will know the personal history of everyone in the waiting room and will have stories to share about their interesting lives. 

I have a different method of surviving long hours of waiting: I mentally wrap myself up in a warm cocoon sequestered from the hospital milieu. Sure, I'm up for a conversation with my son and I'll ask for his help on whatever crossword puzzle questions fall within his areas of expertise (like what's on the flag of Mali or which U.S. state capital has the second-smallest population), but mostly I retreat and try to be anywhere but where I am. On good days I can read a book or article or draft a blog post on my phone even though I can't even see the letters on that tiny keyboard, or I'll play some mindless game that makes my eyes so blurry that I can't read road signs on the drive home.

It's hard to wrap myself in a warm cocoon, though, in those frigid hospital rooms. When we arrived before 8 a.m. yesterday the outdoor temperature was already close to 80 with humidity to match, but I carried a thick sweater because I knew where we were going. The aide who provided the lucky sandwich also gave my son one of those wonderful warm blankets, but no one ever offers me a warm blanket. 

Of course I'm not the patient, the person whose suffering is the center of everyone's attention, but that doesn't mean I'm not miserable. His illness shrouds my every thought, especially when he e gets coughing fits so severe that each cough feels like a dagger stabbing me in the heart, but I'm the healthy one in the room, the one who doesn't have to choke down a dozen pills a day or inject himself with medications that seem to make him sicker or shuffle through a growing pile of medical bills. Lucky me!

I try to hide my misery so I can be helpful to the sick guy; I count my blessings to counter the nagging malaise, but every blessing comes shrouded with a but. I found a great parking space--but it was in a hospital parking garage that fills me with dread. I remembered to put barf bags in my car--but I'm living a life that necessitates barf bags in my car. The treatment is allegedly eliminating every sign of lymphoma--but the side effects make me want to lash out at whoever is hurting my kid.

So I guess I'm lucky, ish, but I won't feel really lucky until we can banish the word lymphoma from our family's vocabulary. Meanwhile, I could really use a warm blanket.

She who dithers, withers

That's comedy gold, my colleague said, causing an instant shift in my perspective: instead of agonizing over an ethical dilemma posed by repeated encounters with an extremely annoying person, why not perform some literary alchemy and turn it into a funny story?

And so I did. Words and sentences flowed easily off my pen (er, keyboard), and afterward I sought feedback from trusted readers, including the colleague whose words had inspired me to stop griping and start writing. It healed something in me, she said, which is exactly what a writer wants to hear, but now I face an even bigger dilemma: what do I do with it?

Outlets for subtle comic essays of around 2000 words are limited, and the main character in mine would be instantly recognizable to those in the know so I would have to use a pseudonym. And so a piece of writing that made me feel energized more than anything else I've written all year sits languishing in a file folder as I dither. 

Dithering seems to be what I do these days. I've been dithering over small decisions, like whether to replace my hefty leather tote before the fraying straps fail and spill all my precious stuff all over the floor, which would no doubt happen at the least convenient time, like while I'm walking through the security scanner at the hospital with my son or while I'm waiting in the checkout lane at the grocery store with a long line of customers behind me, and if I do replace my everyday handbag, should I go for something more compact or stick with a bag that can hold a Norton anthology, a laptop computer, and three stacks of student papers? 

I looked at purses. I priced purses. I thought about buying a purse, but they're such a commitment! I understand that some people have a whole wardrobe of handbags to suit different occasions, but I've never been that person: I buy a bag and I stick with it until it falls to pieces, and while I'm trying to postpone the purse-apocalypse, I dither. 

But I also dither over big decisions, like whether to get a knee replacement this summer or wait until next year, whether to get surgery under my current health insurance plan or wait and see what Medicare can do for me, and then of course I got a cortisone shot as a stopgap and now my knee doesn't hurt at all and part of me hopes it will keep not hurting forever while the more rational part of me knows that the pain will return eventually and it will be even worse so why not fix it before it starts torturing me again? 

So I was leaning toward getting the new knee this summer until I realized that I can't drive my son to chemotherapy while recovering from knee surgery and we really don't need two semi-incapacitated people in my house, so maybe next year would be better. And now I've dithered about it so long that I can't possibly schedule surgery to recover in time for the fall semester. Dither long enough and the decisions make themselves. Options get limited. Possibilities dissolve into the ether.

Well I bought a new purse and I'm determined to get a new knee next spring, so now I need to stop dithering over where to send that funny story. I felt good about performing a feat of literary alchemy, but leaving it languishing in a file folder is an ideal way to turn comedy gold into lead. 

Hovering over the SEND key

How all occasions do inform against me, hollers Hamlet in agonizing indecision, but he was merely contemplating violent revenge over his father's murder. He never had to contend with a recalcitrant refrigerator. 

It's not even my refrigerator! It's the fridge in our Center for Teaching Excellence, and it's suddenly not cool. Granted, nowhere around here is cool today--we're immersed in the kind of humid heat wave that wraps us in thick damp layers of sticky insulation and then squeezes hard so that we can hardly breathe, but indoors, everything is cool. 

Except the fridge. It's downright warm inside, even though the lights are on and it's still humming like a functioning refrigerator. All the cakes in the freezer have thawed, and don't even get me started about why we constantly have five to seven sheet cakes in the freezer. Our work/study student has been busy this morning distributing the cakes to other campus departments before they start to rot (the cakes--not the departments), although those grocery-store cakes are pumped so full of preservatives that I doubt that they'll ever rot. This morning I threw away the remains of a cake that had been sitting out on the table for at least two weeks. Not a sign of rot anywhere.

So anyway: I arrived on campus this morning in despair over the state of my summer writing projects but determined to make measurable progress, only to be derailed by a fridge willing to hum but not cool. I have submitted a ticket to the appropriate department, which wonders whether we can make do with a mini-fridge. Given the number of food-related events we host in the Center, no. We need a fridge! But I need to write! And somebody locked the door to the Writing Wednesday classroom! And I don't have the key! And I'm fielding texts and emails related to the difficulty of replacing a 17-year-old fridge on short notice! And I'm not getting anything done!

Well, I'm getting a few things done--mostly the kinds of things that made Hamlet wonder What is a man / if his chief good and market of his time / be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!

I need to put profound insights into winged words and send them off to journals to enlighten curious minds, but instead I'm haggling over refrigerators. This essay in this to-do folder, the one I've been fiddling with for two or possibly three summers, I've trimmed it down to a reasonable length, tightened the prose, eliminated excessive quotations, researched a journal that might be a good fit, written a cover letter, and attached the file to the email--why can't I go ahead and hit SEND and be done with it? I do not know / why I yet live to say 'This thing's to do', and yet my finger hovers over the mouse, unwilling to take the final step.

If Hamlet can work himself up into a froth of anger that leads to action, then maybe I can too. O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth, hollers Hamlet, but he says this in Act 4 of a five-act play, so he still has to wade through some stuff. 

I'll fetch the key. I'll deal with the fridge. I'll wrestle with a laptop that was allegedly fixed last week, although the fix required deleting all my browsing history, passwords, and settings. I'll send a student forth bearing cakes. And I swear, by all the poison poured into all the ears on all the stages on the planet, that before I leave campus today I'll hit that SEND key and boldly slash that task from my to-do list. 

The rest is silence.

A front-row seat for the summer show

It happens like clockwork every year: the minute the bottlebrush buckeye starts blooming,  hummingbird moths show up. Where do they hide the rest of the year? No idea, but suddenly, there they are.

I remember the first time I ever saw those chunky critters that looked like flying shrimp hovering among tall wildflowers near the parking area at Marie Desonier State Nature Preserve, where my daughter and I went on a hike during the weeks before she started her freshman year of college. I remember wondering what they were and how I might go about seeing them more often. Turns out all I needed to do was to plant a bottlebrush buckeye, which I did ten years ago, using money some people had given in memory of my mother.

They showed up this week after only a few of the buckeye's flowers had started blooming, but each day brings more blooms and so many pollinators that you can hear the buzzing before you see a single bee or butterfly or hummingbird. Today I ventured out in soul-crushing heat and humidity to find three zebra swallowtails fluttering around various areas of the bush, which seems too big to qualify as a bush anymore, towering high overhead and filling in a hefty chunk of yard. Two of the swallowtails got into some sort of skirmish until one flew off into the distance. I reminded them that it's a big bush with plenty of blooms to go around, but they weren't listening.

I'd like to go out and look again to see what else might show up, but it's stinking hot outside, with the sort of humidity that makes you want to plunge into a glacial pool. Instead, I'll wait until the sun goes down so I can watch the next big event: the firefly show, just outside our front window. There's no chance of getting any decent photos, so all I can do is sit here and watch.

Friday poetry challenge: No exit from Escher's stairs

This morning I turned a page in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker and saw myself--my job, my office, my life, plus a handy reply for the colleague who keeps begging me to please please please change my mind about retiring in December. 

It was already a better-than-average issue, featuring Simon Rich's delightful retelling of "The Pied Piper," Amanda Petrusich's gripping exploration of the power of grief, and Julian Lucas's long profile of Colson Whitehead, which made me even more eager to take delivery of his new novel. There's even a short story by Ben Lerner that didn't instantly repulse me--a real accomplishment.

But then in the middle of the not-horrible Lerner story I ran into Chris Gural's cartoon titled "M.C. Escher's Lab Rats" (view it here). Made my day, my week, maybe my year.

I suspect that I'm not the only academic who feels like one of those rats scrambling through an impossible Escher staircase that lures us toward some longed-for apotheosis only to flip us on our heads at the base of yet another set of steps. There's no way out, no way up, no way around, just an endless climb that can't be distinguished from descent, while everyone acts as if the futility is perfectly normal.

Well I need to get out of this rat race. I'm only staying on until December because of health insurance, and then I'm outta here. People keep asking why I want to retire or begging me to stay, which is flattering except I just can't. I could blame the wonky knee that makes standing in front of a class painful and, sometimes, dangerous, or I could blame ever-shifting college policies, enrollment issues, and rampant AI infestation, or I could mention a desire to spend more time with my grandkids while they still like me, but really it comes down to this: I'm tired of living as one of Escher's lab rats, especially when the maze has no end so there's no opportunity to find the cheese.

I don't know what happens when you combine doggerel with ekphrasis, but maybe it's time we found out:

Step up, step down,
go this way round
and through that door
that's on the floor--
up to the attic.
No one is static
but always moves
up well-worn grooves
in stairs that climb
to nowhere. I'm
a rat that wants
to leave the haunts
of Escher's stairs.
But exit--where?

It's not pretty, but if's Friday so it's time to sling some rhymes. Who's next?