Friday poetry challenge: Haiku for you

This morning as I walked from my car to the office, I marveled over the songs of cardinals beginning to feel the first stirrings of spring; now, though, I'm sitting in a dim, cave-like basement classroom where the only sound is the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keyboards and the occasional susurrus of pages being turned. My first-year students are writing in-class midterm essays and by the looks of them, they are working pretty hard. I hope they're paying more attention than the student who wrote in a draft the other day that we all need to learn more about "the history of writhing," because the massive load of student writing I'm facing this week has already inspired writhing enough.

Overwhelmed by the unending pages of student prose I'm reading, I feel the need for concision, precision, and poise. Let's cut out the excess and write some haiku!

Above, birds call for
spring; below, fingers tap out
strings of student prose.

I write, you write, he,
she, or it writes; they write, I
read, nobody writhes.

Read the prompt! Follow
directions! My voice, ignored,
bleats its futile hope.

Outside, the birds still
sing on high, releasing spring
stories over air.

That's it for me. Why don't you give it a try?

Swerving to miss the next disaster

Yesterday as I drove to work I nearly hit a fox, which was exciting for several reasons: because it was a fox, because I missed it, and because I could see it. Daylight! What a remarkable thing to experience on the morning commute!

An earlier sunrise is not the only sign that things are changing. My driveway is now mostly free of ice and snow, relieving the daily angst about whether I'd be able to get anywhere. My new dryer will be delivered next week, relieving the weekly angst about who is going to do the laundry and how and where. And spring break is coming next week, suggesting that we've survived nearly half of a semester of in-person teaching without disaster.

Of course I'm joking about spring break. We do not have a spring break. We're all supposed to be limiting our travel, faculty and students alike, so instead of a spring break we get a spring break day. Yes: no classes next Wednesday! But at the same time, faculty have been notified that we have to require the appropriate number of contact hours despite the single day off, so we're supposed to assign work equivalent to that missed classed time: Go ahead, students, take the day off--but take this big pile of work with you when you go! Not sure that qualifies as a day off.

Meanwhile, we've seen a small spike in Covid-19 cases, including a handful of students in one of my classes. How nervous does it make me to know that a half-dozen of my students, including the one who sits closest to where I stand to lead class, are suffering from the virus? 

Let's not think about that. Instead, let's think about the fox. It was a lovely thing to see a fox, and even lovelier to keep seeing the fox running into the distance after I had swerved to miss it. Let's hope we can keep swerving to miss disasters because I think we've all survived enough for now.

Friday poetry challenge: Winter weather blues

As I walked six blocks through slush and cold to campus this morning, I started composing a Winter Weather Blues in my head, even though no mere song could adequately express the angst inspired by my most recent travails. 

After the massive effort required to get to campus yesterday, I wasn't about to do it all over again this morning, so I decided to stay in town last night. Now I have standing offers from a number of colleagues to let me camp out in their spare rooms, but I don't know how to maintain social distancing in those circumstances--and besides, all my friends have indoor dogs, which would be bound to stimulate an allergy attack.

So instead I decided to stimulate the local economy. I booked a room in the only hotel within walking distance of campus, a historic pile located on the banks of the Ohio River, a place habitually described as charming, quirky, and full of character. By the time I was done with class preps and meetings yesterday, I didn't care about charm or quirks or character; I just wanted a warm, dry room where I could finally take off my boots, put up my feet, and watch the steely-gray river roll by. Which I did, at great length. It is quite a river.

The hotel was quiet as a tomb, no surprise since I saw never saw more than three cars in the parking lot. I heard the occasional train across the river and some honking from the geese that hang out along its banks, but otherwise I mostly sat and watched the river and then, thankfully, slept. Last night I feasted on fabulous lamb vindaloo from the local Indian food-truck restaurant, but this morning I was up and out before all the coffee shops opened so I settled for a danish out of a vending machine. Who knows how old that danish might have been? 

And who cares? I'm back on campus now and I'll get my car back this afternoon. Better yet, the weather forecast suggests that I may actually be able to get it up the driveway. Next week we're looking at temps in the mid-40s and rain, which will be a nice break from all the ice. But meanwhile, it's time to put all that wintry angst into song:

I've got those can't-get-up-the-driveway-so-let's-stimulate-the-local-economy blues.
Oh I've got those can't-get-up-the-driveway-so-let's-stimulate-the-local-economy blues.
Just looking for a warm place where I can kick off my winter shoes.

Oh the river keeps on rolling through the wind and snow and rain and ice and slush.
Yes that river keeps on rolling through the wind and snow and rain and ice and slush.
Seems like Mother Nature don't mess with Old Man River much.

Oh the snow just keeps on falling and the slush piles up for miles and miles and miles.
Yes the snow just keeps on falling and the slush piles up for miles and miles and miles.
But one day when the sun comes out--just watch as it unfreezes all our smiles.

That's my winter blues. Now it's your turn.

 

This is what they mean by "quirky": power outlet in the middle of the bathroom mirror.

Once again I wonder: Where's the faculty helicopter when I need it?

Just in case anyone thought this week couldn't get any weirder, yesterday a tow-truck tried to drive up my driveway to haul away my son's car for repairs, but it couldn't manage the final curve and so tried to back down and slipped on some ice and got stuck sideways next to the bridge and had to call another tow-truck to pull it out. Meanwhile, my son's car still sits there waiting for a tow.

But I am on campus this morning! Getting here was quite an adventure: I packed up my laptop, books, and everything I'll need for a few days in town in a roller bag, bundled up in long-johns and layers, and walked a mile and a half in the snow this morning so a colleague could pick me up at the end of my road where it meets the highway. It was a lovely morning for a walk, with kingfishers calling above the frozen creek and trees still dappled with snow and ice, but walking a mile and a half in full winter gear while pulling a roller bag over a steep, snow-covered road is not exactly a walk in the park. Nevertheless I survived and here I am on campus once again, ready to get caught up on everything.

Some challenges of the icy life

Before he left for Jackson Monday night, my adorable husband left me a lovely bouquet of flowers, some fabulous chocolates, and delicious oranges, which are making these long, cold, can't-get-out-of-the-driveway days more delicious. However, he did not leave behind what I need the most right now: himself.

I went out this morning to fill the wood-burner (because my son managed to get to town and stay with friends last night so he can get to work and he won't be home until the ice allows). My husband left plenty of logs in just the right size for me to pick up, which are about half the size of the ones he generally tosses in the wood-burner because, as I keep reminding him, I'm not Paul Bunyan--or his blue ox either. So I found plenty of wood, but thanks to the ice storm, they were all frozen solid in a big forbidding lump. Where's Paul Bunyan when I really need him? 

Some elbow grease was required to dislodge the logs but I didn't expect the bird-feeders to provide a similar challenge. Ha! It's hard to get a good grip on an ice-covered bird-feeder, and it's even harder to unscrew a lid that's encased in ice. I filled the feeders finally but gave up on opening the suet feeder. I left a chunk of suet out on a post where the birds can get to it and called it a day.

And what a day! I can't Zoom from home so I've posted online activities for all my students. I really need to get to campus tomorrow, but lacking a working vehicle and a passable driveway, I don't see how that's going to happen. The roads are not bad but I couldn't even ask a cab to drive up my driveway, so it's possible I may have to walk out to the end of my road and arrange to get picked up there and then find a place to stay in town overnight so I can teach my Friday classes. But that only works if we don't get more snow, freezing rain, and ice, which are all in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow. 

Yesterday I took a walk around the lower meadow, lifting my legs high to crunch through the ice-covered snow, and I saw lots of small limbs down and some larger ones hanging low because of the burden of all that ice. More ice could bring down limbs and cause power outages like those that have happened elsewhere in the area, but maybe today's sunshine will thaw things out a bit. One can only hope. Because seriously, what are the other options?

Right now the sun is making the snow and ice sparkle like crystals. I can sit in my warm house watching my birds and eating my chocolates and grading my students' work and try not to think about how I'll ever get out of here again. 

Ice day, nice day

For the past few weeks I keep finding reasons to wonder why everything has to be so stinking difficult, so it's a bit of a relief when the situation moved from merely difficult to utterly impossible. While getting to campus has been a hassle recently thanks to snow and car problems, last night's ice storm has made it impossible to even try to get out of my driveway, so here I sit drinking tea and prepping classes instead of venturing out into the frozen tundra.

I realize that we've been relatively fortunate--others have had it much worse. Friends to the west are lacking power this morning, and Athens County roads are closed to all except emergency vehicles. I've seen a salt truck and some cars moving on my road this morning, but the only vehicle that would make meaningful progress on my driveway would be a luge.

Tiny icicles hang from the eaves and the trees and the back deck rails, creating a sparkling world that would merit a closer look if it weren't bitterly cold and windy outside. I stepped out just for a few minutes and found a slick, slippery world that crunches with every step. Excellent excuse to stay indoors! Things could get dicey if we lose power, but for the moment we're doing fine.

The temperature is supposed to drop into the single digits tonight so I don't see much hope for relief from the ice before tomorrow morning, when I will need to get to campus again. Today, though, I don't have classes and I don't expect any great demand for office hours so I'm happy to stay home and watch the ice from a distance, calmly accepting the impossibility of doing otherwise.  

 

Friday poetry challenge: Winning odds (and evens)

In a week full of craziness and unexpected obstacles, on a day when the dryer-repair dude was afraid to drive on my road because of the snow so I had to drive out on those slick roads myself to spend time at the laundromat (not the greatest place for reading Lacan) and then go to campus for all kinds of meetings and then drive home up the same snowy driveway until my car slid gently sideways and got stuck halfway up so that I abandoned it and walked the rest of the way, leaving it where it sat and where it still sits so that I had to hitch a ride with my son this morning and arrived on campus before 6 a.m. (!) and will ride back with him this afternoon to spend the evening digging my car out--on that really crazy day I came out feeling like a winner.

Why? Because I am a winner! At our online campus Founders Day event yesterday, I won a drawing for a $25 gift card to Applebee's, which I will be happy to use when it's safe to eat indoors again. And then I was a winner again when I got home and found a package full of See's chocolates and fabulous toffee from an old friend in California. But mostly I am a winner because when my car slid sideways into the snowbank, my helpful son was on hand to help me move it out of harm's way and to drive me to campus today.

I still don't have a functioning dryer, and I'm still behind on my classwork because of all the ways the snow has slowed me down this week, and I'm definitely not driving to Jackson this weekend with even worse weather in the forecast, but I'm not going to think about those things this evening as I sit in my nice warm house and nibble on See's chocolates and reflect on all the ways I'm winning.

Snow, sleet, rain, and Arctic freeze;
chocolates, toffees, Applebee's.
Dryer death and laundry trouble;
hands that help out on the double.
Odds are trouble keeps appearing,
even when I need some cheering.
When the odd lines leave wheels spinning,
read the evens--now I'm winning.

Yard birds

Just a few yard birds in the snow.

 

A day of delays, declogging, diagnosis

Today for lunch I'm eating yesterday's PB&J, the sandwich I made early in the morning on the assumption that I'd be able to get out of my driveway and drive to campus, which would have been a good assumption if we'd received the one-to-three-inches of snow in the forecast instead of the solid eight inches that actually fell, and perhaps if my road were not down so low on the county's priority list that we didn't see a snowplow until close to noon, when, instead of eating my PB&J at the office, I was sitting at home watching birds at the feeders.

Dozens of cardinals, three different kinds of woodpeckers, sparrows and juncos galore, and then two handsome starlings notified all their friends and we soon had dozens of starlings squabbling over the suet feeder. They put on a very entertaining show, but I really should have been grading freshman essays except that I had left my computer at the office so I was unable to do a lick of grading or prep work on my unexpected day off and consequently I am now behind on absolutely everything and scrambling to get caught up.

But I used my time wisely (ish). Sat and watched birds. Read a big chunk of a Louise Erdrich novel. Cleared snow off the front porch and a bit of the driveway (until the shovel broke). Cleaned the bathrooms (and used the plunger on the clogged toilet). Made brownies. Cleaned the kitchen (and unclogged the clogged kitchen sink, using the old-fashioned vinegar and baking soda method since I wasn't eager to brave the snowy roads just to buy drain cleaner). Examined the wood-burner in hopes of discerning why it hasn't been able to raise the temperature in the house above 63 all week (and called my husband with the results, which allowed him to diagnose the problem from a distance--a plugged-up chimney--but I'm not the one responsible for climbing ladders to clean out gunky chimneys, so he made a special trip home last night to fix it in the night, in the dark, in the cold).

I did not do laundry since our dryer is still on the fritz and the dryer dude who was scheduled to come and fix it last week couldn't get here because of snowy roads but is due to return tomorrow, after another night with snow in the forecast, so who knows when we'll have a functioning dryer again? Good thing we all so love the laundromat!

But at least I didn't have to make a new sandwich this morning--and hey, I brought one of those brownies to work too, a delicious treat. I've been working like a maniac just to keep my head above water today, and if I remember to take my laptop home with me tonight, I may be able to grade those papers while waiting for the dryer dude, assuming that he's actually coming.

Winter in the woods! You never know what might happen next, but you can only hope you'll have the right tools to cope with it.

Post-Covid fantasies both expand and contract

When this is all over, I told my colleague, I intend to burn Zoom, which would be difficult to accomplish even if Zoom were a physical object instead of a vast cloud-based conspiracy to numb my students into total mindlessness. Burn it, I say! Right down to the ground!

Last March in the first throes of lockdown and all-online teaching, I distracted myself by planning elaborate trips I would take After Covid: flights to California or road trips to Alaska or walks on a New Zealand beach. These days my escape fantasies are far simpler: I just want to take my grandkids to the zoo. I just want to linger at the library or walk the indoor track at the rec center or visit an art museum. 

I want to teach a class with all my students in the same room at the same time, and I want to ask them to form small groups to discuss the reading, and I want to take them all on a field trip and sit around a table at a crowded restaurant talking about literature. Is that really so much to ask? 

And yes, I'd like to see their faces instead of their masks and hear their voices unmuffled by masks and hold face-to-face conferences in my office instead of on Zoom. As much as we rely on Zoom and need Zoom and appreciate what Zoom makes possible, I cannot love the way Zoom inserts itself between me and my students, sometimes dropping a student entirely or mangling the audio so every third word gets lost and always making it way too easy for students to hide behind screens when they should be engaging with ideas.

I know I can't blame Zoom for everything awful about pandemic pedagogy, but with no clear outlet for my anger and frustration, I find relief in the fantasy of taking crowbar in hand and smashing Zoom into a million tiny pieces, or throwing Zoom out of a helicopter to the soundtrack of The Flight of the Valkyries, or tossing Zoom off the edge of a Big Sur cliff and watching it plunge helplessly into the rocky Pacific below. 

And then walking calmly toward a library, hand-in-hand with my grandchildren, with not a mask in sight.

Friday poetry challenge: Don't ask the mask!

A friend wonders whether this bizarre life we're leading is squelching my creativity and yes I said yes it is yes!

The mask makes it more difficult to be understood, to the point that sometimes I calculate whether it's even worth the effort to open my mouth, and I know my students are feeling the same way. But the mask is a visible sign of this invisible cloud we've all been living under. Sure, lots of people have responded to the pandemic by letting their creative juices flow in all kinds of interesting ways, but over time the cloud has turned dark and heavy and surrounded me like a damp wool cloak, suppressing my ability to think or speak or write creatively.

I know I'm not the only one feeling this way. I have to force myself to write anything more complicated than an email, and even then I struggle to put together words that reach beyond the perfunctory. My mind feels blank, my language leaden--even my dreams are colorless and blah. Where is the creativity of yesteryear? And will it return to full flourishing after life gets back to normal, whatever normal means these days?

Maybe what I need to do to keep the creative ideas flowing is to give them a regular outlet. That's why I'm trying to revive the Friday Poetry Challenge: if I force myself once a week to engage in a little creative word-play, maybe the exercise will open a conduit to keep the creativity moving through the pipes. It's worth a try. Setting a specific goal helps motivate me to act, and if there's one thing my sluggish, lazy, couch-potato brain needs right now, it's exercise.

So this is me, exercising my creativity within some narrow constraints. Feel free to join the fun!

Don't ask the mask!
It maims the game
of words. I've heard
the same from fam-
ous folk. Don't poke
the beast! It ceased
to care; it stares
or sleeps. Don't speak
of dreams--it seems
they're dull, a null,
a nought. I ought
to pull and mull
some words I've heard,
stretch sounds around
in play. I may
abound in sound
again. 'Til then,
don't ask! The mask
prevails. I fail
the task. (Don't ask.)

Oh snow!

Look out any window to see a scene of loveliness: at home, bright red cardinals standing out against a snowy background; at the office, a blue college flag flapping above the snow-covered campus. From safe within a warm house or office, the snow adds an enticing layer of white to the otherwise bleak midwinter, a soothing vision for my fatigued eyes.

But driving in this weather is another story altogether. For days I've been fighting my way through a mixture of snow, slush, fog, rain, sleet, and ice every time I leave the house; the snow isn't particularly deep but it keeps coming, so it's really hard for the roads to stay cleared. This morning I followed a snowplow most of the way to work, rarely moving at more than 30 mph even on the highway, but even behind the plow the road remained slick and treacherous.

Yesterday's drive was the worst; I arrived home feeling wet, cold, exhausted, and miserable, but then I opened the door and smelled bacon. My adorable husband had made breakfast for supper, eggs and bacon with homemade bread inside my warm cozy house where I could look out the window and enjoy the beauty of winter without the cold nipping my cheeks and toes. 

I ought to put my boots on and go out for a tromp with the camera--which, as far as I can remember, hasn't been out of the camera bag for the entire month of January--but I'm stuck on campus for meetings and course preps and teaching observations, because yes, the tenure and promotion committee still has a heavy workload this semester so I'll be visiting a bunch of classrooms over the next three weeks. But the days are getting longer so I may get home before dusk, and if I do, I'll try to make some footprints in the snow so I can say I enjoyed winter before all this loveliness melts clear away.