Certain uncertain slants of light

There's a certain slant of light that always inspires me to quote Emily Dickinson inappropriately, not that she's complaining. Maybe if she'd spent a little less time cogitating and more time weed-whacking, she'd have seen those slants of light less gloomily.

If Emily had been walking with me in the woods this morning when the air was so thick with fog that I was soaked through in minutes, if she'd been walking beside me when I set out on the trail slowly and with much misgiving because of pain and stiffness caused by my inability to stay on my feet while weed-whacking (of which more later), if she'd joined me in gloomy resolution to keep walking despite the dank surroundings that echoed my inner weather, perhaps she might have wondered at my response to that certain slant of light that burst through the fog, lit up damp green leaves, and lifted my spirits enough to put new hope and resolve into my every step.

I marvel at the power of a simply slant of light to change my mood, but I despair of ever catching that power in a photograph or conveying in words how light shining through trees can make me want to keep on walking through the darkest woods. I always think of Emily Dickinson's "certain slant of light" at those times, but Emily was clearly writing about a different light from the one I find so exhilarating. Her light oppresses, afflicts, hurts, convicts, reminding us of the inescapability of death, as only a New England winter afternoon light can do; the light that leads me forward through the woods lifts oppression, evoking wonder at the constant renewal of nature.

I needed that slant of light this morning. Yesterday afternoon I spent way too much time sitting in a long, futile meeting, and when I finally got home I decided that I might just have time to finish the weed-whacking out back before the dark clouds released their deluge, and indeed I did have time to finish but not without mishap: I slipped on wet clippings, fell down the slope,  twisted my back, and caught myself with a hand that landed neatly in a poison-ivy patch. Very nicely choreographed if I do say so myself. A quick shower washed away the poison ivy oils but could not calm the pain in my back, which stiffened up so much that I had trouble sleeping and then had trouble getting up and moving.

I ought to just stay home, I told myself. I ought to just sit here and sulk over what a useless klutz I am, and while I'm at it I can shop online for one of those little scooters old people use when their mobility is permanently impaired. Let's just thoroughly embrace the sedentary life--after all, nobody ever fell down a hill into a poison-ivy patch while sitting on the sofa, right? Who needs to walk around anyway? Let the world come to me!

Foolish thoughts indeed, so I forced myself to hobble out the door, drive halfway to Jackson, stop at a nature preserve so far out in the middle of nowhere that if I'd perished no one would have happened upon my remains for a long long time, and set out into the woods, slowly, stiffly, with little hope of completing the hike without tears. I trudged forward, hunched under the backpack, not even bothering to take out the camera because of the pervasive fog. Nothing looked too photogenic anyway: trees, creeks, rocks, more trees, whatever. I saw some small limbs and tulip-poplar blossoms tossed to the ground by yesterday's storm, smiled at the shapes of leaves on sassafras saplings, wondered how that deer managed to bound so quickly up a nearly vertical slope, but mostly I just kept telling myself to keep going because if I'd stopped in the middle of the woods in that kind of mood, I might never have gotten going again.

And then the light broke through. Who knows why these things happen? One minute I was a bundle of gloom trudging through a dank fog, and then the woods lit up as if someone had flipped a switch. There's a certain slant of light--that lifts, that cheers, that banishes my evil mood and keeps drawing me back to the woods even when my body calls out to merge with the sofa. It's an experience that can't be predicted, engineered, or manufactured; the only thing I can do is be there, with my eyes open, even if I'd rather be somewhere else.

See, Emily? Better look quickly before it goes away.

Just what we need for summer writing

So far this morning I've already written a chunk of prose toward an essay I've been thinking about for ages, an essay I could have started writing at any point in the past six months if the creative part of my brain hadn't been crowded out by all the concerns of pandemic teaching. With students gone and fall semester far away, I feel the way I did after finally finishing the PhD: as if a glacier has finally receded, allowing the underlying land to begin to bounce back. It may take a while to bounce back entirely, but in the meantime it feels really good to be writing again.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, because we've had a larger than normal number of faculty members attending our weekly Writing Wednesday sessions in the library. Last year Writing Wednesday was cancelled because of social distancing requirements, but this summer we're meeting again face-to-face, seven of us spread around a large classroom, working on our own projects, separate yet together. We write without distractions, phones silenced and email ignored, and afterward we share the exhilaration of making measurable progress toward our writing goals. Last week we even ate lunch together at a picnic table outside the library. We're not entirely back to normal yet, but our spirits rise as the glacier recedes.

Last week I focused on writing down a bunch of ideas about the poem I'm trying to analyze, and I so thoroughly lost track of time that the end of our session arrived as a shock. Writing these initial notes, though, revealed a sticky problem: the next steps of drafting will be largely determined by audience and purpose. Do I want to aim this essay toward an academic journal, or do I envision a more casual, non-academic audience? Do I want to focus on theoretical issues and analysis of the poem or emphasize the implications for pedagogy? I wasn't prepared to make this decision last week so I decided to park the idea and give it some time to develop.

And here's the wonderful thing: if I give the creative part of my brain time and space, it will keep working even when I'm not paying attention. The answer arrived as if unbidden: Much of my experience with the poem arises from my attempts to break through my students' resistance, so the essay will necessarily be informed by pedagogy; however, more than anything I want readers outside academe to comprehend the power of this poem, which provides valuable insight for our present moment. So I guess I'm writing a pedagogy-inflected essay for a non-academic audience, if that makes any sense. At some point I'll have to figure out where to submit such a hybrid beast, but first I need to write it.

Writing Wednesday give me time and space to do that, but the most important thing it gives is permission--to ignore texts and emails, the demands of home maintenance and the needs of family members, students, administrators, and everyone else outside this room. Writing Wednesday stands like a barrier holding back the glacier of responsibility that always threatens to overwhelm the writing life. Some small part of me knows the glacier will inevitably return, but while it's in abeyance, we sit in silence and write.

A one-way trail is better than no trail at all

We fell in love with Hocking Hills on our first visit in 1997, and since then we've managed to hike the trails in and around Old Man's Cave at least once each summer--until last year, when everything shut down. Now the trails are open, but the brand-new visitor center is shuttered and all the trails are marked for one-way traffic, which can make it difficult to pursue some of our favorite routes. So we settled for a simple hike down to Old Man's Cave followed by a visit to Conkle's Hollow, where we found some spring wildflowers still in bloom and wood thrushes filling the gorge with song. It's good to get back to such beloved places.

Just stop me from reading my course evaluations next time, okay?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any change a teacher makes in response to complaints on student course evaluations will inspire a whole new set of complaints. 

I envy my colleagues who tell me they never read their course evaluations. I keep telling myself to ignore them. After all, there is literally nothing at stake for me--no more promotions, not much chance of competing for teaching awards, no fear of being fired for bad teaching. I am confident in my abilities and I generally have a good sense of what's working and what isn't, so the course evaluations do little more than reinforce what I already suspected. ("Her tests are hard"--right, I knew that, but they're a lot easier for student who actually do the reading.)

But then why do I obsess over the negative comments? They're not exactly overwhelming; in fact, our response rates for course evaluations have fallen so low that it would be ridiculous to take them very seriously. Last semester I had a class in which only two students responded to course evaluations. They said nice things, but that's just two students--what about the other 16?

And this spring semester I had two classes in which not a single student submitted a course evaluation. Okay, we were all exhausted at the end of the pandemic-teaching year and there's no reward for submitting evaluations, but I've never before had zero response from half of my classes. One of those classes had only four students enrolled but the other had 16, so I would have expected at least a few responses.

So I ended up with course evaluations from my two sophomore-level literature classes, but even there the response rate was right around 40 percent. Numbers and comments were mostly positive, but as usual, one negative comment sticks in my craw: the student complained that I was "rude." Why? Because I called on random students in the middle of class, expecting them to comment on the reading assignments.

Let me just briefly quibble with the word random: I didn't just grab the next student who happened to be walking down the hallway and demand that she tell me what she noticed about the difference between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's line lengths; I called on students who were enrolled in a class in which they were expected to engage in discussion on specific works of literature. Whatever their reasons for registering in my classes, they were there for the purpose of studying literature, which is what I tried to get them to do. There's nothing random about that.

It's true that I called on various students in the middle of class, but that was intentional: I was trying to deal with students' increasing unwillingness to engage in class discussion. As long as I've been teaching, I've regularly received complaints on course evaluations stating that I need to engage more students in class discussion, and with the problem worsening under pandemic conditions, I took the bull by the horns and set out to call on every single student in my literature classes at least once a week. Sometimes I would go down the course roster and call on students to comment on the reading; sometimes I went row by row. When the gunners in the front row tried to dominate the conversation, I would ask for a response from further back, and I was often pleased to hear the interesting insights provided by students who wouldn't normally volunteer to comment. 

So the system worked--except when I called on students who hadn't done the reading. I might say something mildly admonitory like "Try harder next time," which a particularly thin-skinned student might interpret as rude, but the course evaluation complaint made it clear that the very act of cold-calling students in the middle of class is rude. 

On the other hand, I didn't get a single complaint about the need to engage more students in the discussion. That's a first! And I'll accept that as evidence that cold-calling is a valid response to students' unwillingness to engage. If they don't want to talk about literature, they should take a different class; the rest of us are gathered together non-randomly to discuss literature, and we're going to do that regardless of whether my methods are considered rude.

Saying goodbye to bullying arrows

So much can change in a few short weeks! I was on campus briefly yesterday to pick up my laptop and it felt great to be able to walk from my car to my building without a mask, but I didn't notice the most welcome change until I was ready to leave: all the little arrows on the floors and doors have been removed. No more one-way staircases! No more exit doors that are hard to access from my office! No more bullying arrows pointing out my intransigence on those rare occasions when I cheat and go out the entrance door!

I noticed a similar change at the grocery store: all the signs and arrows marking one-way aisles have been removed. Everyone was still wearing masks inside, but I no longer had to strategize how to get to that lone item in the middle of an aisle when I was on the wrong end to go the right way, if that makes any sense. I know those one-way aisles helped maintain social distancing, but many customers ignored them entirely, while those screaming arrows gave the tiny Puritans living inside my head one more reason to make me feel guilty every time I shopped.

Of course I know we're not out of the woods yet. My county is experiencing a sudden surge in new cases, although the total number is so low that it would have looked like good news a few months ago. On campus we're allowed to remove masks indoors in small groups as long as everyone present is vaccinated, but if anyone objects, we will gladly keep them on. I'll keep masking in other settings until the local vaccination rate rises to a more reasonable level, but it's a treat to be able to keep the mask off outside, especially in the face of an approaching heat wave.

Most of all, though, I'm delighted to say goodbye to all those bullying arrows. To celebrate my newfound freedom, when I leave my office today I intend to walk straight out the most convenient doorway, even if someone is coming the other way.  Take that, tiny Puritans! I'm walking wherever I want!

Adventures in gas-pumping

When I asked the cashier at the gas station why they weren't allowing customers to pay at the pump, she replied, "Well, some of our customers were getting aggressive with the screens on the pumps, so they're all out of service."

I feel their pain.

We were in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when people started the crazy panic-buying of gasoline. Our first indication that anything was wrong was when we kept having to swerve suddenly around lines of cars waiting to pull into gas stations. We had about a quarter of a tank of gas left on Tuesday and knew we would need a tank and a half to drive home on Thursday, so we decided we'd better fill up.

Easier said than done. By Tuesday evening, many gas stations in the area were out of fuel, and those that still had fuel had lines stretching every which way, with no attempt to maintain order. It took a while but we finally filled up for some absurd amount of money, which was good because by Wednesday morning, no stations in the area had gas.

On Thursday morning we drove inland for an hour before we saw a station that appeared to be open, and we filled up again in central Virginia, at a gas station that had suffered from overly-aggressive customers and decided to establish some order by directing traffic to specific pumps and preventing line-jumpers. 

In nine hours of driving, the highest gas prices we saw were over $3.00 a gallon, and the lowest gas price was at the station closest to our house--$2.85. A worker there told me they had seen some panic-buying but not enough to drain the tanks, and they never had the kinds of lines we saw in North Carolina.

We're happy to be home again (briefly--heading off to see the grandkids today!) and especially happy to have found fuel when we needed it, because otherwise we would have been stranded. A few more days at the beach wouldn't have killed me, but missing my granddaughter's birthday party tomorrow might have made me mad enough to punch a gas pump.

Just beachy

It doesn't matter how long the drive or how annoying the traffic, that first glimpse of ocean waves washing up on the beach seems to wash the trouble out of my soul and draw me onward. We had to dodge some heavy rain and lightning today but enjoyed a walk at Elizabethan Gardens (in Manteo, North Carolina), a picnic lunch at Jockey's Ridge State Park (in the presence of giant sand dunes), and a walk on the beach at Kitty Hawk, where ospreys flew overhead and pelicans dove for fish in the surf. We spent the weekend visiting family, and now it's time to take off our sandals and walk barefoot on the beach while the breeze blows the cobwebs out of our brains. That's my kind of vacation.

Brown thrasher

I can't identify these but they smelled very fruity.

 

Hoping for a Zoom-free break

An unfortunate side effect of my year of pandemic teaching is an inability to see beyond commencement. Just get through the semester, I've been telling myself, and don't worry about what comes next.

But now it's time to figure out what comes next. Fun!

Today I cleared up a few items still dangling from the spring semester, including a long meeting that made me want to poke out my own eyeballs with a rusty fork. Tomorrow I'll hit the road for a long-delayed trip to North Carolina to visit my father, whose assisted-living facility is no longer on lockdown. When I get home a week from now, I'll face a full slate of summer projects:

1. The collection of essays I'm editing on teaching comedy. After a bundle of pandemic-induced delays, the full manuscript got approval (with suggested revisions) from the editorial board, but my work is far from done. I'll need to revise my introduction, notify contributors whose essays need revision, solicit abstracts and permissions, and polish up the whole thing for final submission by the end of the summer. That's my kind of work! Deadlines are highly motivational and I'm really enjoying working with the contributors to this volume, so this will be a fun project.

2. A new essay that's been rumbling around in my head about some poems by Natasha Trethewey. So far I have some interesting metaphors and a nebulous idea about how they might come together, and I'm eager to see what develops.

3. A course proposal for the interdisciplinary sophomore seminar I'm teaching next spring on the topic of what connects people to places. Once again nebulous is the operative term: I've been making notes about possible readings and assignments for the class, but those notes must be assembled into a formal proposal accompanied by a full syllabus, which will be a challenge. I could write the syllabus in my sleep if the class didn't have to be interdisciplinary, but the need to move beyond literary sources is stretching me outside my comfort zone. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4. Revising syllabi for my fall courses. I have no new classes this fall but I am switching to a different textbook for composition, and of course there are the usual revisions to my other syllabi. No new courses! That's a gift.

5. Gardening. Our itinerant lifestyle has made it impossible to plant a full vegetable garden for the past couple of years, but this year I'm determined to rehabilitate the herb garden and get a pollinator garden going at one end of the lower meadow. I could have started planting the herb garden already, but the utility guys replacing the power poles kept parking their massive equipment right where I needed to work. I keep thinking they're done, but there they were again today. Maybe they'll be done by the time we get back from our road trip. 

6. Home maintenance: Paint the front door and the trim around the window; get the porch slab replaced; keep up with the mowing. Not particularly exciting but rewarding all the same.

Anything else? Oh, spending time with the grandkids, of course, and getting out in the canoe again. The usual summer excursions. There's really nothing particularly spectacular on my list of summer goals, but every day I spend away from Zoom feels like a vacation.

Speaking of which, time to pack!

Resuming a semblance of normalcy

We celebrated commencement on Saturday for this year's graduates and on Sunday for last year's graduates--as many of them who wanted to return for the face-to-face ceremony they missed last spring. As I suited up to serve as a faculty marshal, I tried to remember the last time I had to get into my regalia. Maybe fall of 2019, for the matriculation ceremony? It felt good to put on the layers of fabric, great to stand outside with students bubbling with excitement, and absolutely fabulous to hear a cell phone ring loudly from underneath layers of voluminous robes and to know that the ringing phone was not mine. 

Commencement was different this year--distanced, masked--and the ceremony was shortened. Everyone appreciated the commencement speaker's remarks, which were brief, pithy, and punctuated with a gift: a tote bag containing a laptop computer for every graduate. That's over 200 laptop computers donated by our commencement speaker. True, we gave him an honorary degree, but that's a lot of laptops.

Today there were many things to celebrate at my five-hour committee meeting: We met face-to-face! Masked and distanced, yes, but with not a Zoom screen in sight! And despite all the complications inherent in our task—doling out faculty committee appointments—we got through it all without rancor or discord. And we had a great lunch—together! (Distanced and masked.)

But over lunch, the costs of this peculiar pandemic year became apparent: after a year of eating lunch alone in our offices, we’ve forgotten how to chat while eating. As we sat at a distance from each other tearing into our boxed lunches, a long stretch of silence settled into the room and no one made eye contact. These are normally really talky people, but today, for the longest time we had nothing to say.

I broke the awkward silence with a confession: “I’ve forgotten how to eat with other people.” My colleagues laughed, but the spell was broken and soon we’d slipped back into our usual bantering roles. If nothing else, the experienced proves that we can get our groove back, as long as someone is willing to break the awkward silences. I've done my part. Who's next?