Arrangement in gray and black

No snow in the forecast this morning and yet there it was all over the road and getting thicker by the minute. 

The sky was black. The snow was white. The road was shades of gray.

Yesterday I attended an event for which the invitation specifically called for "professional attire," but jeans and boots and sweaters were the order of the day. Only a fool would wear a skirt and heels when the parking lots are dotted with icy spots and hard chunks of snow, and road salt walks into the building on all our shoes, dulling the shine on the parquet floors.

My jeans are black. My shoes are white. The floor is dull and gray.

Frank X. Walker is Black. His book Affrilachia collects poems about the African American experience in Appalachia, including one called "Fireproof" about church people who, like fire ants, swarm in response to distress, working together to rebuild their beloved sanctuary after an arsonist burns it down. Their souls, says Walker, are fireproof in the face of hate. I nearly choked up teaching that poem today to students who keep coming back eager to learn despite Covid cases and quarantines and tech difficulties and their entire lives being disrupted. 

My mood was black. They made my day. 

My day is cray-cray-crazy. Another finalist for the botany position will be here today, another opportunity for me to walk a botanist across campus to the next appointment and point to the big piles of snow and say, "In the spring that will be a pollinator garden." Sorry, botanist! Nothing growing here today! 

(The snow is white. The sky is gray.)

And in between the cray-cray-craziness I have to obtain a Covid test because I may have been exposed by a close contact, although probably not, but I was in the same room (unmasked) with the person but not for more than ten minutes, or maybe twenty, or maybe less, and we're not exactly huggy people so I don't know if we ever breathed the same air so who knows? I'm positive that I'm (probably) negative but only the test can tell for sure.

My fears are dark. That's all I'll say.

Making tracks

In the winter woods, sunshine hits the snow-frosted tree limbs, causing a steady dripping on the snow below and leaving behind a filigree of ice on the tree. All sounds are muffled: brittle oak lives shifting in the breeze with a sandpapery sound; water from a drainage pipe dripping onto creek ice with a metallic clink; boots brushing through soft snow saying shh--shh, shh-shh. 

I didn't go to campus today, obviously. Didn't even try. Yesterday's snow was more abundant than expected so coming home last night was an adventure that I didn't really feel like repeating today, and I don't have classes today anyway so why bother? True, I'm missing my office hours, but in the grand scheme of things, office hours are not worth risking one's life for. So I'm working from home and spending some time enjoying the snow, which is much prettier when you don't have to drive in it.

 

 

 

Can't live the life of the mind without lunch

I found ice in my hair when I got in the car this morning, which suggests that if I must scrape the ice off my car when the temperature is in the single digits, I ought to dry my hair first. But I survived that little adventure, just as I've survived the epidemic of yawning in my classes today. Judging from my impact on students, I could make a bundle marketing today's lectures as a sleep aid.

But instead let's celebrate surviving the first week of classes despite heavy weather, increasing Covid cases, and extra activities associated with my service on a search committee. By the time I'm done this evening, I will have been on campus for twelve solid hours, and here's a dilemma: if I teach at 8, 9, 11, and 1, meet with a job candidate at 10:30, and attend the candidate's presentation at noon, when am I supposed to eat lunch?

When I finally got to it--after 2 p.m.!--my lunch was pretty special: leftover lasagna, which I made from scratch yesterday afternoon. Anyone who goes home after a hard day's work and then puts together a big pan of lasagna ought to be showered with gold stars, applause, and fireworks, but my reward for yesterday's hard work was the opportunity to finally sit down this afternoon at my desk and enjoy a steaming hot lunch of leftover lasagna.

 

 

 

 

Between comfort and joy

On the same day we learned that my husband's cousin's wife had been hospitalized with Covid, we also learned that a colleague's horrible deadly diagnosis was not cancer after all. For more than a month he'd been living with a death sentence and then the tsar told the firing squad to put down their guns, and he couldn't have been more relieved.

Taken together, these two bits of news should have averaged out to make it a meh kind of day, but extreme news doesn't work that way any more than extreme weather does: if today is freezing and tomorrow is boiling, I'll feel it deeply both times. 

Yesterday I had coffee with the colleague who received the reprieve; he described the whiplash effect of the shifting diagnoses, and he's delighted to be out and about personally thanking all the people who helped him and his wife deal with the impact of his surgery and recovery. It was a joyful meeting, full of hope and cheer.

But also yesterday, the cousin with Covid died after three weeks in the ICU. She was always the fun one, full of life and energy and gossip and interesting ideas for outings, so it's hard to imagine her stilled and silenced. Her husband, of course, is devastated, as are other family members and friends. I'm sad and distracted and angry at this stupid virus, though it's hard to know what to do with that anger.

Covid has required us to get comfortable with case counts and death rates and big scary numbers, but when the numbers hit home, they still hurt. It's as if we've all been standing in front of the firing squad for the last two years, uncertain whether the guns are aiming our way. Some will receive a reprieve, but for others, the reprieve will come too late.

So what can we do? I'll reach out one hand to congratulate my colleague on his new cancer-free life and I'll reach out the other to comfort those mourning the loss of a beloved family member, and somehow I'll hover between the two extremes, feeling both deeply and doing my best to carry on.

   

When travel is for the birds

As I look at the snow piled high on the driveway, I thanked my lucky stars for a Monday holiday, a husband who loves to get out on the tractor and push snow around, and a house well stocked with food. Snow day! I'll have to get my car out of the driveway tomorrow, but today it can sit there looking like a snowdrift until the cows come home--or the cowbirds, as the case may be.

As soon as we had light enough to see outside, I opened the bedroom window and hunkered down with the camera to see what kinds of birds would visit the feeders. That window serves as a natural bird blind, partially concealed by vegetation and far enough from the feeders so that I don't spook the birds. At first I saw the usual mixture of winter birds--juncos, woodpeckers, chickadees, a lone titmouse--but then suddenly a black wave swooped down from above and colonized the feeders.

Darn those starlings I thought, until I looked closer and saw that they were not starlings but cowbirds. The dim light made their brown heads hard to see, but the size and shape and coloration all said cowbird. I've never seen so many together, at least 50 attacking the feeders or perching in nearby trees. A few gathered on the front porch and looked in the big picture window, lured, presumably, by the mass of green plants just inside. They scattered when I closed the window, but they've come back for a few more visits. I'm not a fan of cowbirds but I'm not sure what I can do to keep them away--I can't go slamming windows all day long.

I could have gone to campus today for some Martin Luther King Jr. day events, if I could see my driveway. The sheriff's office tells us to stay off the roads unless travel is absolutely necessary, and I'm happy to comply. On a day like today, travel is strictly for the birds.

 

 

  

Dispatches from the first day of class

Twenty minutes until class begins and I am SOOOOO looking forward to seeing a room full of freshpersons on a cold dark January morning!!!!!  Except the room won't actually be full because who wants to take an 8 a.m. class? And one student will be on Zoom because of Covid quarantine, so that means I have to remember to turn on the camera, turn on Zoom, check the microphone, share the screen, and include the quarantined student in class discussion....How about if I just give up and go back to bed instead?

And now here we are in the middle of class and the Zoom link doesn't work inside Moodle. It worked fine yesterday! I can open up the Zoom link outside Moodle, but all I get inside Moodle is an error message. Nice! I have to email the Zoom link separately to my quarantining students and try to figure out the problem later. 

Am I allowed to refer to our Zooming student as quarantining? Does it violate the student's privacy? I've announced that the class Zoom link isn't intended to accommodate students who  just don't feel like getting out of bed and walking to class, but it is available to those with valid medical excuses, like a need to quarantine because of Covid, so even if I don't mention that Zooming students are in quarantine, their classmates will surely figure it out.

Everyone writes on the first day of class, not for a grade but to give me an idea of their writing and thinking skills. My first-year students are writing about a personal goal and some obstacles they might face in reaching that goal, and they're pretty united in wanting to improve on their academic performance from last semester (I clearly have some repeat customers in this class) while about half of them say they want to be their best self, in those exact words. If I were Oprah I might be able to help them with that, but all I can promise is to try to help them become better writers, which might come in handy if that best self ever needs to communicate. (At 8 a.m., I'd be happy if my second-best self showed up.)

About a third of the students on my roster didn't show up for class at 8, which is a bit alarming, but the 9:00 class did better--perfect attendance, plus an extra who wandered in a bit late. We later determined that he's on the waitlist and I was happy to admit him to the class, since I suspect that the amount of reading and writing on the syllabus will scare away a few students.

And if the reading doesn't scare them away, the writing might. What a horrible person I am to make students in a literature class look at a work of art and write a paragraph or two about what they see! I don't let them see the name of the work but you can view it here. When we meet again next Wednesday, we'll look at the work again and discuss how to start analyzing an  unfamiliar cultural artifact, and I'll try to discourage the secret hidden meaning approach to literary analysis. "The meaning isn't hidden," I'll tell them; "It's right there in front of your face, but sometimes you have to look at it a little sideways before it clicks."

Back in my office--two classes down, two more to go, but I could use a nap already. I'd like to wander down the hall to visit with a colleague, but she's on sabbatical this semester and so keeps not being there, lucky her. Who's going to step in and take care of my emergency chocolate needs? If the Professional Development committee had known how much I rely on this colleague when I desperately need a bite of chocolate, they never would have approved her sabbatical. 

But it's time for my 11:00 class, which seems crowded. How did 20 students get into a course limited to 18? Good thing I made extra copies of the syllabus!

It's my first time teaching the new sophomore seminar course so I spend a little time explaining to students why we felt the need to add this course to the general education curriculum: It's all about scaffolding. The sophomore seminar will reinforce the skills students learned in their required first-year courses (information literacy, writing, public speaking) while building a bridge toward the junior core class, which I'm teaching this afternoon. 

The sophomore seminar is supposed to be an interdisciplinary approach to a big question, so in my class (My Happy Place) we'll examine what connects people to specific places by reading and responding to place-based literature alongside some history, psychology, and science. Fun? I hope so, but then an English professor's idea of fun may not be the most reliable gauge.

Lunchtime, and yet another reason to be glad my husband has moved back home from Jackson: the man can make a sandwich! Homemade ciabatta bread, sliced turkey, cheese, and mustard--if that sandwich can't power me through my final class, nothing can. (Though a little chocolate right about now wouldn't hurt.)

Last class of the day! Five bright young English majors wondering why they're required to take a class called The Ethical Author. This is my dessert class--my end-of-the-day reward for all those 8 a.m. composition classes. Right now my English majors are writing about the role poets would play in their ideal society, a question that will loom large in our readings for the next couple of weeks. What is literature for, anyway? I'm eager to see what they say.

But mostly I'm happy for the chance to sit down and shut up. By the time I've gone over four different syllabi, I'm tired of hearing the same sentences come out of my mouth over and over, so I've changed things up bit: "I live in the woods, where we communicate by whispering messages into the fuzzy ears of woodland creatures. If you can't reach me after hours, you're talking to the wrong raccoon."

And now they're done writing so my teaching day is over. I'll take care of a few things in my office before heading out, and the really good news is that I don't have to make that 90-minute drive to Jackson every Friday afternoon but instead I can head straight home, where the most pressing issue this evening is whether to call that new squash-and-sausage dish squasage or sausquash. 

I miss teaching when I'm not doing it and I never feel more alive than when I'm with students, but at the end of the day, I'm worn out. Next week I'll be back in the classroom trying to add some new twists to the same old song and dance, but until then, it's squasage time!

(Though I really could use a little chocolate. Help?)

Flights of fancy in the midst of the mundane

A friend texted to encourage me to "have a glorious day on campus," but I spent the morning sitting in meetings full of administrative PowerPoint followed by a long, lonely session with the photocopier. Glorious is not the word.

On the other hand, I finally picked up a package that's been waiting in campus mail--a new mug and a bunch of tea sent by an old friend. The mug is kind of special; it's called Fowl Language and it features pictures of birds with names that sound a little off-color: the dickcissel, the rough-faced shag, the blue-footed booby. Very cute, and it was comforting to camp out next to the nice warm photocopier with hot tea in my new mug while zillions of syllabi rolled through the wheels. 

This mug is the fourth bird-related gift I've received this Christmas season; also under my tree were three books with pictures of birds on the cover. I have not yet begun reading A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul with its flock of migrating birds on the front, but I'm about halfway through On Animals by Susan Orlean, with a spare front cover adorned by a single adorable chicken. Chickens play a large part in the essay collection, although guineas, turkeys, and pigeons also make an appearance, plus donkeys and mules and lions and a killer whale and I don't remember what else. Despite some distressing details on animal extinctions and cruelty, it's a joyful reading experience.

And I read right through Ann Patchett's new essay collection, These Precious Days, with a painting of her dog on the front and a pileated woodpecker on the back. Those paintings play a role in the title essay dealing with an unexpected pandemic friendship with an artist; another essay called "Covers" explores the vagaries of book-cover design, with interesting examples from Patchett's experience. I had read many of these essays before but they play well together as a collection, and the book as a whole made my mind take flight.

Another Christmas gift finally arrived this morning--a new set of tires for my car--so I'm a little less nervous about taking flight on the wintry roads. I have a few more boxes to unpack at home and a few more details to prepare for my classes, but when I'm surrounded by so many charming birds, how can my day be anything but glorious?

 

 

Click and breathe, slowly

As much as I complain about my slow internet connection at home, I appreciate its advantages. Here I sit on my comfy sofa constructing a new course page on our course management system, the last bit of Moodling I need to do before classes start next week, but I have a ton of documents to upload and each one takes a while. At the office I sometimes click-and-scroll so quickly that I make myself dizzy, but at home I click on "upload" and then wait a minute or two or even three while it loads. Meanwhile, I look out the window at the bluejays visiting the feeders, juncos jumping around in the snow, sunlight glimmering on frosty trees, and I relax until it's time to upload the next document.

Back in the dial-up days, uploading a document in 60 seconds would have felt like a miracle, so I'm not complaining. And I appreciate the way my son-in-law reconfigured our antenna setup so my slow connection is significantly less slow--not so long ago I wouldn't have been able to upload documents at all. But mostly I appreciate an excuse to slow down and take a breath between clicks. Some days I have a need for speed, but it's nice to spend a lazy Saturday sitting at home and looking out the window while my documents slowly upload.

A time to hunker

My inbox is full.

My gas tank is empty.

My house is crowded with boxes but less crowded than it was a week ago, and it will be even less crowded today after I make the first of several trips to the Goodwill store.

My eyes are tired from a quick road trip to North Carolina to see Dad, who is doing great despite everything, but now I need to unpack and get back to work. 

Classes start a week from today and if I'm not quite ready, I'm well on the way to being ready. 

A winter storm is coming this afternoon and my Christmas gift of new tires has still not arrived so I don't trust my car in the snow. I arrived on campus at 7 a.m. and I intend to get a pile of work done before noon today and then grab some groceries, deliver a pile of boxes to the Goodwill, and get home before the snow starts falling. 

For the next couple of days I'll be hunkering down, unpacking more boxes, and putting the finishing touches on syllabi. At some point I need to get my brain back in active mode, but for now I'll mindlessly scroll through my inbox hitting delete delete delete. I want an inbox as pure as the driven snow, as long as I don't have to drive on that snow in my car.