It's not just the calendar pointing toward autumn: on these cool mornings I drive through dense fog along the river, wearing a jacket or sweater that I'm bound to leave behind somewhere when the sun comes out. The pollinator garden has reached Peak Sunflower while the grass around my house seems to have finally slowed down its frantic summer growth. And the cool nights are already inspiring mice to seek a warm indoor space to spend the winter--time to bait the mouse-traps!
At school the changing season means my students suddenly find themselves facing demands in every class, from history exams to chem lab reports to oral presentations. And in my classes they'll all be submitting drafts--all my students--over the next week and a half. "Do you read them all?" asked a student this morning, but of course I do: read and re-read and respond and reach out. So the honeymoon's over for me as well as my students; a week from now I'll be struggling to keep up with the flood of drafts alongside class preps and committee meetings. ("I feel like you go to a lot of meetings," said our new administrative assistant, but we all have a lot of meetings! Maybe I just complain about them more.)
Between the morning fog and the flood of drafts, I keep wishing someone would toss me a lifeline. I wish I could follow the advice in Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home," except then I'd have to deal with the mouse problem. Let's write some haiku!
Fog blankets the road,
blanks out my thoughts, bringing
the promise of autumn:
Sunflowers hover
above us who hunger for
transient colors;
their heads droop with seeds,
ours under workloads that mag-
nify gravity.
Light in the fog, or
lines on the page: a lifeline!
Let autumn roll on.
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