Mounting toward beauty

"We have to make things beautiful; they do not grow so of themselves," wrote Edith Wharton, and she certainly lived out that principle when she built The Mount, her house near Lenox, Massachusetts. This is the place where she was able to free herself from her mother's oppressive influence and invent herself as an author, but after her marriage fell apart, she sold The Mount, moved to Europe, and never returned. The house eventually fell into severe neglect, but a massive restoration effort in the past 30 years made the house and grounds again a place of beauty. 

Every place we looked, we saw something beautiful, whether inside the house, in the gardens, or on the paths through the woods. Even the path up to the little pet cemetery where Edith's little dogs were laid to rest is a treat for the senses. The Mount currently hosts an outdoor sculpture show called Sculpture Now, which added interest to the experience; it's delightful to happen upon a little art at a bend in the path. It was a beautiful experience, for which I am grateful to both Edith Wharton and the Edith Wharton Restoration group that keeps it beautiful. 

 

"Old Growth" by Bobby Sweet

The path to the pet cemetery

The wrapped trees are part of an art project.

We didn't see any bears, alas.

Catbirds were active all over the grounds.

The gap between upper and lower hedges created a window onto a view toward woods and pond.

grape arbor

Edith's bedroom, where most of her writing happened

The desk in her study--I wanted to take it home with me.

"One Leaning on Another" by Joy Brown

"Balthazar III" by Wendy Klemperer

"Gruntled Inflection" by Justin Kenney

Detail of "Unbridled" by Deborah H. Carter

"Gourd II/Homage to Van Gogh" by John Ruppert

Detail of "I Have Been Dreaming to Be a Tree" by Byeondoo Moon

Taking the waters

It feels somehow decadent to say we've been taking the waters at Saratoga Springs, but that's what we did today: we went for a walk at Saratoga Spa State Park, where mineral springs and geysers spew out water once believed to have medicinal qualities. Some of the water smells like sulfur and some turns rock formations vivid shades of orange and red. We tried the water at Tallulah Spring, a tiny, unimpressive fount near the roadside, and I found it refreshing in a way I can't quite describe. It's bubbly, yes, with a depth of flavor ranging from sweet to slightly salty, but mostly it tastes wet, if that makes any sense. 

After spending the first half of the week inside windowless rooms at my conference, it felt good to get out into the woods and walk amongst the dragonflies and butterflies (and, sadly, mosquitoes). We sat for a while next to Geyser Creek, where I felt like a voyeur watching dragonflies mate. Then we had a great dinner overlooking Saratoga Lake and went back to the hotel to pack for the next leg of our trip.

Tomorrow we're off to Lenox, where we'll see Edith Wharton's house and whatever else grabs our attention. The working part of this vacation is now over, so it seems appropriate to stroll through the woods and take the waters in a leisurely fashion. I don't know if the water will cure anything, but it sure makes me feel at rest.

One of several geysers.

Massive mineral deposits left behind by geysers.

This spring smelled very sulfurous.

The new rock looks fake, like faux boulders at a theme park.

Tallulah Spring, the water we drank. Sweet and bubbly.

Tallulah's trickle.

Our dinnertime view.

 

Academic writing: sometimes you need to just drive around the guardrails

After I presented my paper at the American Humor Studies Association conference yesterday, a grateful grad student came up to me and said, "I've been wanting to write about my teaching experiences, but I didn't know I was allowed to do that."

This made me both sad and hopeful: sad because of the way many graduate students unquestioningly accept the guardrails that constrain their academic writing, and hopeful because here was someone who had something interesting to say and who wasn't going to allow the traditional constraints to silence her.

I understand why grad students need to be trained to stay in their lane, to avoid the anecdotal and to ground their academic writing in appropriate theoretical contexts, but I was presenting a paper on teaching comedy during Covid-19 and I don't know how to talk about my teaching experiences without using the word "I" and offering specific examples. If those examples were engaging, amusing, or inspiring, I'm not going to apologize for that. I've reached a point in my career where nothing is really at stake, so I may as well say something that matters and that might make a difference in a listener's life.

When that student told me she didn't know she was "allowed" to write about her teaching experiences, I shared a few venues that encourage such writing. For instance, Pedagogy's "From the Classroom" section includes essays about hands-on teaching methods described with academic rigor. Further, the book display at this conference includes a number of collections of essays focusing on pedagogy, including, of course, my own collection from the MLA, Teaching Comedy.

Writing about pedagogy may be considered a second-tier pursuit in some circles, but we can all benefit from hearing about other teachers' classroom experiences. That grad student told me she appreciated hearing the insights I've gleaned from decades of teaching experience, and I told her that I appreciate hearing the insights of young people trying out brand-new ideas in the classroom--but that will happen only if someone writes them down.

Maybe she will. And someday maybe more graduate programs will function in a way that empowers students to write about their teaching without worrying about whether such writing is "allowed."

    

Trip prep trip-ups

Talk about excellent timing: yesterday I finally received the document I needed to get a permanent license plate for my new car. The temporary tag expires next week, in the middle of our road trip across seven states, and I could just imagine getting pulled over in every single one of them and cited for driving with an expired tag. This evening I'll get the resident handyman to install my new license plate and tomorrow we'll pack up and head on down the road.

My other fear was running out of  blood pressure pills in the middle of our trip, so I tried to get the prescription refilled yesterday; however, our insurance company wouldn't cover the cost because the refill was four days early. Fortunately it's a small enough cost that I was willing to cover it myself, but I find it bizarre that my insurance company thinks it would be better to skip my blood-pressure pills for a week than to refill the prescription four days early.

Still to do before we can leave: refill the hummingbird feeders (although the hummies seem perfectly content to rely on the bottlebrush buckeye right now), pack, print out my conference paper (first academic conference presentation since 2019!), send some important documents to the new provost, and attend what I hope will be my last-ever Faculty Council meeting. Oh, and figure out what to do with the sudden onslaught of garden vegetables. I mean, how much kale can two people eat in 24 hours?

I'll spend the day tied to my to-do list checking one thing off after another, and then tomorrow we'll pack up my beautiful new car and ease on down the road, free as a bird. I'll miss the hummies, but they'll do fine without me.

A regular waddle-fest

Waddling is my superpower I said, but I wasn't exactly myself at the time: I was speaking for an eight-inch-tall plastic action figure, some sort of robotic creature in teal and silver who was playing an important role in a drama orchestrated by my five-year-old granddaughter. 

She was using the pink Power Ranger figure, a misshapen hulk with too-broad shoulders and a tiny head. The action figures were having a contest involving jumping, kicking, and comedy, all scripted and directed by the five-year-old. All I had to do was follow orders, which at one point required trying to make the Pink Ranger laugh and at another point required me to proclaim an unusual superpower. 

"You're invisible," said Little Miss Dramatist, but in this case she was referring to the actual me rather than the plastic figure in my hand. Sadly, my invisibility wore off by the end of the game and I had to go back to being myself, just an ordinary grandma with no superpower at all unless it is the ability to fall in with the grandkids' plans.

Yesterday those plans included a ride on a sternwheeler on the Ohio River, where we saw a great blue heron, a pair of eagles, and lots of interesting boats. A passing coal barge was a big hit with the littles. This morning they're eager to go out in the garden with Grampa and pick some more veggies, and later we'll have a holiday cookout and a hike in the creek. At some point I suspect that we'll break out the marshmallows and make S'mores.

What a great way to celebrate our freedom: by eagerly engaging with the plans of creative young people as they charge boldly into the future. Or, in my case, waddle.

 

Time to stop and smell the wildflowers (but not the poison hemlock)

Note to self: it is a mistake to try to identify roadside wildflowers while driving past at 55 mph. Better to walk up at a leisurely pace, or at least pull the car over and snap a picture and enlarge it later to identify the unknown species.

Nothing terribly special: just a bunch of patches of white mullein blooming along the state highway. I love yellow mullein, which I will happily mow around whenever it pops up beside our driveway, but I don't recall seeing white mullein before. This year it's all over the place, its sturdy stalks hoisting white blossoms above roadside weeds. Really quite lovely up close, but not so easy to get close to on a road with an insufficient shoulder.

It's the season of tall wildflowers, from the gangly Queen Anne's Lace to the spindly chicory to the invasive and poisonous wild hemlock. Ironweed and Joe Pye weed stalks are poking up everywhere but not yet blossoming, and it's a banner year for daisies. I haven't been up the hill this week to see how the milkweed is doing--too wet and muddy--but my bottlebrush buckeye is getting ready to bloom and then there will be pollinators.

At home and on campus I'd dealing with various types of claptrap related to the project I'm working on for the provost (writing a manual and designing workshops for academic department chairs)  as well as the new role I'm taking over in August (chair of the Art Department, which will work fine as long as they don't ask me to produce any art). I could spend 25 hours a day writing notes to myself, revising drafts, sending emails about workshops, or fiddling with paperwork, but going outside and taking a look at what's blooming helps clear my head and straighten out my priorities.

Taking the camera along calms me and helps me notice details, but my Nikon is exhibiting signs of age or moisture or too many tumbles or overuse in marginal circumstances--or maybe it's inhabited by gremlins. At any rate it took me two days to find a way to download photos this week and then they weren't very good. Maybe time to start looking for a new camera? 

So I drive past tall stands of wildflowers alongside the highway and wonder whether I ought to stop and take a closer look and snap some pix, but the shoulder's too narrow and I don't trust the camera and then I've gone too far to feel like turning around. 

It's better, anyway, to walk slowly up to the wildflowers. Otherwise, all this beauty passes in a blur.

 

New hummy feeder--a Christmas gift--working well!

Leadership drama invades my dreams

Any change in leadership, however welcome, is bound to spawn some anxiety--which may  explain the bizarre nightmare from which I struggled to extricate myself last night.

I dreamed that the soon-to-be-ex-President of the College paid a surprise teaching-evaluation visit to a Latin class in which I was trying to teach a bunch of bored students how to form the instrumental case--and he fell asleep in my class.

How ridiculous is that? Let me count the ways:

1. By the time classes resume in the fall, this President will have no authority over me. He's leaving! I saw the moving van hauling away all his possessions just the other day!

2. The President plays no part in evaluating teaching, and in fact I've never known him to visit a class except as an invited guest speaker.

3. Class visits for the purpose of evaluating teaching are arranged in advance--no surprises!

4.  Unless our new leadership institutes post-tenure review for full professors nearing retirement, it's unlikely that anyone will visit my class to evaluate my teaching ever again.

5. Latin? The only Latin that has been taught here in this century is the one-credit-hour online Medical Latin courses offered for pre-med students.

5.  Me, teach Latin? I took one semester of Latin around 1985 while my husband was in seminary because spouses could take a certain number of classes for free and I thought Latin would be useful in my graduate studies. I was both the only female and the only non-seminarian in the class, and I still vividly recall the wave of titters when I incorrectly translated a sentence thus: "Do not expect my arm to be around you or yours to be around me." I don't recall whether Latin has a separate instrumental case or how I would teach such a thing, but the question is unlikely to arise in waking life because I'm never going to teach Latin.

6. He fell asleep in my class. Wait, that could actually happen.

Our new President and Provost begin work July 1, and if I'm accounting for all the interims, I think this will be my eighth Provost and my fourth President, which suggests either that we're tougher on Provosts or that it's more difficult to dislodge a problematic President. I've seen a wide range of leadership styles and skill levels, and on the whole, I prefer a leader who is competent but prickly to one who is incompetent but kind. Add a little evil to the mix and it gets more complicated: an incompetent but benign leader may be annoying, but a competent but malignant leader can be downright dangerous.

I've met the new Provost and heard great things about the new Interim President and I am  confident that they're the right people for the job, but the path of change is rarely without its potholes. If my subconscious mind feels the need to wrestle with some underlying anxiety, so be it. 

Besides, this nightmare scenario isn't really all that scary. If you really want to hear me scream, wait until I dream about visiting a class to evaluate someone else's teaching--but this time, I'm the one who falls asleep.  

Of donkeys and distance and faux erudition

This morning, for the first time in ages, I walked up the big horrible hill near our house, puzzling all the while over two questions: What happened to the donkeys? And what am I going to do with Edith Wharton? The two are not entirely unrelated.

Slogging up the gravel road, waving away clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, wandering past the meadow where the red-tailed hawk swooped and the creek where the kingfisher called and the woods where the pileated woodpecker cackled, I kept wondering whether I'd find donkeys at the top of the hill. 

For years our top-of-the-hill neighbors kept expanding their paddocks until placid donkey faces poked expectantly over fences on both sides of the road and far back into the woods. I enjoyed seeing the baby donkeys toddling toward adulthood, but I haven't been up there in a couple of months and hadn't thought about the donkeys until our neighbor's obituary appeared in the paper.

We didn't know our neighbor well enough to go to the funeral, but we knew he was old and in poor health and frankly, I don't know how he and his wife managed a large herd of donkeys on their own. The obituary didn't mention the wife--a mystery!--or the donkeys either, although that didn't surprise me so much. On our small country road where houses hide in the woods at a good distance from one another, we know our neighbors by their cars, their tractors, and their animals. I don't have any curiosity about what happened to the neighbor's tractor after his death, but I do wonder about the donkeys.

As I got closer to the top of the hill, it was clear that big changes were afoot. A section of woods and a dirt road had been cleared; pink flags marked the path of something or other; a pile of twisted metal debris sat alongside the road; and the larger paddock had disappeared entirely. The smaller paddock was still there, though, and four or five mini donkeys stood together in the shade, looking like a group of stolid neighborhood gossips leaning in for a tasty nugget of news. I wished they would turn and spill the scoop, but I had to carry my unanswered questions down the hill. If only I knew my neighbors better!

This dearth of intimacy between people is a central theme of Edith Wharton's fictions, where questions unasked or unanswered doom characters to painful isolation even in the midst of crowds. But that's not why I was thinking about Edith Wharton this morning. I've been re-reading some of her works in preparation for our upcoming visit to The Mount, the home Edith Wharton built in the Berkshires, which provided the impetus for her book The Decoration of Houses. Both house and book served as a declaration of Wharton's independence from her mother, while finding a place that felt like home made possible Wharton's early forays into authorship. The Mount eased Wharton's path toward literary production, and even on repeated readings her fictions never fails to enthrall, which makes me wonder: why do I so rarely put Edith Wharton on any of my syllabi?

I've taught The House of Mirth in the American Novel class, where it makes a nice accessible prelude to more challenging works like The Sound and the Fury or Their Eyes Were Watching God. And I've taught The Age of Innocence in the literature-into-film class, but I could imagine replacing it with Ethan Frome because of the way the 1993 film (with Liam Neeson!) makes cold and distance so palpable. But I don't include any of the wonderful short stories in American Lit Survey--and, even more surprisingly given Wharton's gift for social satire, I've never put any of her works on the comedy syllabus. What's wrong with me?

Part of the problem is that the world in which Wharton asks us to immerse ourselves can feel very distant from the world my students inhabit. Why should they care about the social niceties of the upper crust in nineteenth-century New York? Rich people problems! Why can't those tortured characters just drop their pretenses and say what they mean? (I can precious porcelain teacups shattering on the drawing-room floor...)

And the problem is even more complicated when it comes to Wharton's satires. Consider the opening lines of "Xingu," a short story that never fails to make me laugh out loud: "Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition."

Here Wharton invites us to observe the foibles of a group of women who aren't as smart as they think they are, but before we can observe how she skewers their pretensions, my students are going to run up against "indomitable" and "erudition," words that will inspire some of them to seek out the dictionary and others to give up on the story entirely and read an online summary.

And what a shame! Because they'll never get to know the priggish Mrs. Plinth, who issues stern warnings against discussion of topics she doesn't comprehend; or the striving Mrs. Leveret, who carries Appropriate Allusions as a hunter carries ammunition and whose greatest fear is that a visiting author, Osric Dane, might use a different volume; or Osric Dane herself, the author of The Wings of Death, a book the club discusses at some length without having actually read it. 

And worse yet, they'll never encounter the marvelous Mrs. Roby, whom the other women dismiss as an intellectual lightweight because "At Miss Van Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had confusedly murmured: 'I know so little about metres--'" (How many of my students are equipped to get that joke? By the time I've explained about dactyls, how many will care?)

And if they aren't willing to follow the subtle stabs at pseudo-intellectualism in Wharton's book, how many students will appreciate the irony when the lightweight Mrs. Roby is the only huntress able to pierce Osric Dane's defenses, puncturing her arrogance and exposing her flaws? I picture a classroom in which I am the only one laughing when Mrs. Roby asserts that Osric Dane's novel is "immersed" in Xingu, which causes the other women to marvel and issue their own commentary on Xingu without any understanding of what the word means.

Here Wharton brutally satirizes non-readers who sit around trying to impress each other with their erudition despite their unwillingness to take the most basic steps toward learning, like doing the reading or looking up unfamiliar words. Yes: she's satirizing my classroom.

But my students will never know that unless I add "Xingu" to the syllabus.

So why don't I do that? That's another unanswered question I had to carry up and down the big horrible hill, without a single donkey to share the burden.

Writing in the round; or, random bullets of pie

Come to think of it, pie bullets are not a bad idea. Imagine: in the heat of the summer, in the heart of the city, tempers flare and guns are pulled but instead of bullets, they shoot pie. Or: two warring countries propel pastries at each other and then all the soldiers have to put down their weapons and sit down for a kaffeeklatsch. There are few problems that cannot be improved by pie.

Here's how you know I'm on summer break: if you ask me what I've been doing this week, I'll say, "I baked a pie." That's about it--but goodness it was a great pie, maybe the best pie I've ever baked. But it wasn't easy: usually at this time of year the local farm stands are overflowing with fresh Georgia peaches, but the Georgia peach crop failed miserably so we're seeing a big pit of emptiness where peaches ought to be. But last week I snagged a basket of South Carolina peaches--tiny, hard, not entirely ripe--and let them sit a few days until they were soft enough to put in a pie. It's a pain peeling very small peaches, but I'm willing to put up with the pain if the end result is a fresh peach pie. And then the crust: After all those years of watching my daughter make perfect pie crusts, somehow I got it right. Tender, flaky, golden crust; luscious peachy filling with cinnamon and nutmeg--best pie ever.

Writing about pie makes me think of John McPhee, who allegedly once said, "Everything I write about is round." This was back in the last century, when he was busy writing about oranges and basketball and our whole beautiful world, and when I was busy writing a paper demonstrating the impact of the circular structure in one of McPhee's books, though I do not at this point recall which one. Did he ever write about pie?

My favorite Cormac McCarthy book is sorely lacking in pie but also many other food items, since it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where food sources are rare. The Road is a remarkable book, pithily devastating and beautiful, and the author, who died this week, should be applauded for that accomplishment as well as others, but in my mind he will always be associated with one of the more miserable experiences of my grad-school career, when a professor assigned Blood Meridian but then wimped out of teaching it and required the few  who had read it to defend the book. I've written about this incident previously, but the fact that I can still feel that trauma after 25 years shows the power of petty grad-school political shenanigans.

I look back at that sad past self, ganged-up-on and forced to defend a problematic but beautiful book, and I want to reach back in time and hold out a piece of peach pie. In fact, why not offer the whole pie--everyone would have to move their chairs closer together to get a piece, and then maybe we could men the broken circle and have a real conversation without anger or rancor or bullying.

So whoever you are, whatever you're doing, stop for a few minutes and pull up a chair and let's enjoy the peace of pie.

A little shameless self-promotion

After four years of work with some really fabulous writers and the terrific editing staff at the MLA, I finally got to hold this book in my hands. I'm still impressed by the variety of perspectives and topics on using comedy to teach many kinds of classes--but don't just take my word for it. Check it out for yourself!

 

Season of green

Strange spring so far: first cold and wet, then very hot and dry, and now just right, except we could use some rain. The garden looks great but we haven't had any significant rain in the past two weeks and watering by hand gets tiresome. Some woodland creature ate all the leaves off the purple basil, but this morning I see some new foliage coming up. Otherwise, everything is beautifully green.

For the past two years we've avoided mowing a section of the lower meadow, hoping to encourage a pollinator habitat. Last year it just looked scruffy but this year it's taking shape.  mostly tall grass and clover right now, but I see some asters and ironweed coming up. Later I'll try to establish some milkweed and bee balm down there and see what happens. It's an experiment. Nothing much at stake unless you're a butterfly.

 

 

Magnolia blossom

Redbud is pretty even when not in bloom

Potential pollinator habitat

Dandelion clock

 

If the car fits--drive it!

I was sitting at a car dealership waiting to see some numbers when I heard a gravelly voice say, “I’m looking for a truck that fits my big butt.” I had to fight the urge to turn around and gawk, but it made me wonder when car manufacturers are going to offer the kinds of special features today’s customers really need, like Enhanced Rump Capacity.

It took me a week and some travel and a lot of test drives, and let me just say that it’s a little disconcerting to drive an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar neighborhood full of one-way roads packed with traffic, especially so soon after my head-on collision with a deer made me a little more jumpy than usual while driving. But I bought a car! I’m almost afraid to drive it because I still see phantom deer leaping from the woods every time I hit the road, but my slightly-used Honda HRV sure looks pretty parked in my driveway.   

(The rental car I’d been driving, a black Kia, did not look pretty, and I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about it until I realized that it looked like one of my grandson’s Matchbox race-cars. It would be just my style if I were an eight-year-old boy.)

One car salesman asked me to call him Pappy and another made me want to ask whether his mommy knew he was out of the house.  A finance guy conversed intelligently about David Foster Wallace while printing out a sheaf of papers for me to sign. One portly middle-aged salesman dashed around the freezing showroom and roasting car lot without a pause for the whole two or three hours I sat there waiting to sign my life away, but he sold me the car I wanted without pressure or fuss. 

I spent the better part of a hot afternoon at this dealership because they were short-staffed and I'd driven an hour to get there so I couldn't exactly go home and come back. But then to make up for the long wait, the dealership delivered the car to me directly the next day so I wouldn't have to drive an hour to pick it up. Helpful!

In fact, every car salesman I encountered was pleasant and respectful—a far cry from the days when a car salesman could look me in the eye and say, “Well now honey, why don’t you come back when your husband can come with you?”

Also, none of them quibbled over my special needs. My arthritic hip demands something that sits a little more upright than my old Camry, and I also wanted decent gas mileage, heated seats, a rear backing-up camera (how did I ever live with it?), four-wheel drive (because of where I live), and some color. One salesman pointed out that most buyers these days prefer what he called “neutral” colors, but I don’t think I should have to defend my preference for colorful cars. If I’m going to spend that kind of money, I don’t want to drive a gray car. Or a black one. Or whatever you call that shade of green that can make a brand-new Rav-4 look like it’s being consumed by slime mold.

I decided a few years ago that I’ve reached the age when I’m allowed to drive a red car, but good luck finding one today. I would have settled for a nice blue or a woodsy green or just the right shade of orange, but I had my heart set on red. So you can imagine how I felt when I called a dealership an hour away and asked if they had any low-mileage HRVs available for a test drive and they said that one had just come in but hadn’t been cleaned up and didn’t even have a price tag on it yet—but it was red!

Well it’s my car now. It’s sitting out front looking pretty while I’m trying to motivate myself to sort through the pile of stuff I pulled out of my old car--phone charger, chapstick, tissues, stadium blanket, sunscreen, hat, reusable grocery bags, bird-call identification CD, hiking stick, expired insurance cards, a small fortune in quarters, and all the miscellaneous detritus that attests to a well-loved car. That Camry took me to a lot of interesting places before meeting its sudden end, but at the moment my spiffy red Honda holds nothing but possibility. It may not feature Enhanced Rump Capacity, but it suits me to a T.    

 

Driven by deadlines

A 10-year-old child of my acquaintance has been out of school for a week but is already complaining about summer break. "I just don't feel challenged," she says, and I feel her pain! Without a challenge I loaf and mope and procrastinate, and then the guilt I feel from loafing makes me cranky, which makes me want to isolate myself, which makes me even crankier until I spiral into a vicious circle of self-loathing.

The antidote is simple but not easy: find a challenge. I need deadlines, meaningful work, necessary tasks! A long expanse of time with no clear deadlines becomes a shapeless mire of meaningless sloth.

Last summer's shape was provided by too many deadlines and tasks: funeral, eye surgery, editing project, home improvement. This summer break has so far been blessed with few deadlines and little to do besides planting the herb garden and mowing the lawn.

And then I hit a deer and totaled my car, and suddenly I'm spending a lot of time corresponding with insurance agents, gathering documents, and listening to hold music on the phone. I've been reluctant to start shopping for a car until I learned the amount of the insurance settlement, which turns out to be around $2,000 less than I paid for the car five years ago, and if you need evidence that the current car market is crazy, there it is. My insurance company will pay for my rental car for another week or ten days, so there's a firm deadline: buy a car by the end of next week. 

And then what? More mowing, more watering the garden (unless we get some rain), more work on an academic writing project that's still at such an early stage that I can't even think about putting words on the page just yet. It's a long summer and I have no more rooms to paint, so I need a project.

Which is why I was so easily persuaded to take on a new challenge that starts in August but will require some summer preparation. The details are not yet public but I've agreed to fill a void in leadership in a department outside my own. It's a low-drama department staffed by wonderful people, but none of them can serve as chair right now so they need someone to do the organization and paperwork required to keep the department going--oh, and run a search. Just a few little tasks to keep the wheels on the bus going round and round. In the process I'll gain valuable hands-on experience to inform my revisions of the department chairs' manual, and I'll get a small but meaningful stipend and another course release--which will give me an entire year without teaching first-year composition.

I'm rotating off Faculty Council in August and I'd requested an easy committee assignment for next year, hoping to spend less time dealing with meetings and paperwork. But after only a few weeks of summer break, I'm jumping with both feet on the first available challenge and looking forward to cranking up the meeting machine and dealing with a big pile of paperwork.

But first I need to buy a car. Challenge accepted!    

 

Deerly departed; or, bad time to shop for a car

When the air bag came blasting toward my face I thought it was the deer coming through the windshield, and then everything turned white and I couldn't tell whether I was on or off the highway. All I could see was a cloud of white powder--no deer bounding across the road, and no road. Finally I looked in the rear-view and saw that somehow I'd managed to stop my car on the shoulder, out of the way of rush-hour traffic. 

I couldn't breathe. The air smelled hot and sour and dusty, and the rigid side-wall air bags blocked the door so I couldn't get out. I couldn't find the emergency flashers but somehow managed to turn off the radio. I fumbled for the keys and stabbed the air bag to let out the air, and finally I was able to disentangle myself from what was left of my car. Crumpled. Hissing.

People stopped. They asked whether I was okay and I kept saying I'm fine, I'm fine, but my hands were shaking and I couldn't get the smell of the air bags out of my mouth. Today my ankle hurts from stomping on the brakes and I have bruises from the air bags and seat belt, but I'm fine. Really.

Nevertheless I was glad to sit on a nearby tree trunk while a nice young man called the highway patrol and a wrecker service, and I was glad to have him stay around while we waited in the harsh sunlight for help to arrive. It turns out that he was in marching band with my son years ago, so we had a lot to chat about. After a while my car stopped hissing so I went back and found my baseball cap to shield my sunburned face from further damage.

Earlier, I'd met my husband for supper and we'd bought a flat of plants for the garden--tomatoes and peppers and a lone pot of rosemary--and then he'd stayed in town to run some errands while I drove home with the plants on the back seat. When I hit the deer the flat went flying but the plants remained intact, and so did everything else inside the car, although things were not where I'd expected them to be. 

But my beautiful car!

This is the second time I've wrecked a car by hitting a deer (thought not, obviously, the same deer). The last time, in 2018, I encountered a deer on a dim morning on our narrow country road, where we see deer all the time. The car was still driveable but, because of its age, the insurance company considered it totalled. This time the deer appeared out of nowhere right in front of me in bright sunlight on a state highway where I was driving 55 miles per hour in what passes for heavy traffic in our neck of the woods, but somehow I didn't hit anything other than the deer.

And what about the deer? It disappeared entirely, and I'd assume it was a phantom if it hadn't left behind some tufts of fur on the hood of my car.

I've been relishing the thought of having not much pressing work this summer, no eye surgeries or funerals to plan, no major home improvement projects, but now I face a task I hadn't expected: shopping for a car. The insurance adjuster hasn't looked at the car yet but from what I told him on the phone he suggested that it's probably toast, which I am inclined to believe. I have seen the crumpled hood and heard the hissing and I don't envision ever getting inside that car again.

I loved that car and I dread the thought of finding another that I can love as well, but what can I do? This is the cost of living among deer--and at least I managed to walk away from the wreck with nothing worse than a few bruises. I hate to think what happened to the deer.

 

Feeling the burn

First sunburn of the season! This spring has been so wet and overcast that I've spent less time outdoors than I'd like to, but today was perfect for all kinds of tasks: cleaning the outdoor furniture, mowing the back yard, weed-whacking along the driveway, and planting the herb garden. By midafternoon my arms and face were glowing, and not in a good way.

Still, it was good to be out amongst the growing things, although I would have been happier if I'd noticed that big stand of poison ivy before I started weed-whacking right through it. The herb garden, as usual, was overgrown with lemon balm, which filled the air with lemon scent as we pulled it out to make way for basil, oregano, dill, and parsley. (No one has rosemary plants this year. Why?)

Our flower baskets out front are now abloom and the first hummingbirds have finally arrived at the feeder. Out back the tulip poplar is blooming, but a big section of the back lawn has been colonized by ants. The ants panic when I mow over their massive piles, but I'm just grateful that fire ants haven't moved this far north.

Temperatures have been ranging from the 40s at night to the mid-70s during the day, but with some cooling breezes and low humidity, we haven't needed to turn on the air conditioner. With the windows open all night we can hear the spring peepers down by the creek in the evening and, in the morning, the songs of birds. A wood thrush sings out beyond the wood pile every morning, reminding me to relish the transient beauty that comes with spring. Even if it's accompanied by sunburn.

 

Adding "nothing" to my to-do list

My goal this week is to accomplish absolutely nothing, but I'm not sure I can manage it. My inner drive to check items off my to-do list keeps raising its ugly head--and besides, if I achieve the goal of accomplishing nothing, then I've accomplished something and I'll have to start all over again tomorrow. 

I've been puzzling over why this summer break feels much less crowded than last year's summer break, and I think I've figured it out. Last year at this time I was dealing with my father's death, deeply immersed in a hands-on home-improvement project, attending frequent Faculty Council meetings in response to the still-smarting budget pinch, planning a brand-new class, and taking the collection of comedy essays through various stages of the editing process. 

This summer I'm doing none of that. I have no more parents to bury, no new classes to plan for fall (though I'll do some revision at some point), no more rooms to paint or closets to empty, no more essays to edit, and few Faculty Council obligations (unless a new disaster strikes before August, when my term is finally done). The spring has been too wet to permit planting so there's not even any gardening to do, and I'm all caught up on the mowing (until next week). What to do with a wide-open expanse of time?

I do have some summer projects. I need to revise and complete the new manual for department chairs and plan their August workshop, and I'll need to shepherd the Natasha Trethewey essay through the publication process (although I think the final edits have been approved). I'm giving a paper at an academic conference in July, but it's based on my work in the comedy volume so there's no new writing to do; however, I'll need to finish planning that trip, particularly finding lodging for he day we visit The Mount, Edith Wharton's house.

This week, though, I'm aiming for nothing. I'd hoped to accomplish nothing on Monday but couldn't resist finishing the mowing and baking that wonderful summer berry cake I love so much. I'd like to accomplish pretty much nothing today, but I've already been outside to take pix of pretty blooming things and feeling grateful to whoever gave us those gorgeous yellow iris bulbs and to my prior self (for digging up columbines from a roadside ditch and planting them in our front garden years ago) and to the previous owner of the house, whose lovely rhododendrons brighten up that shady sport alongside the driveway every spring. 

Being grateful isn't a lot of work but some days it's a real accomplishment, so I guess I've already blown my opportunity to accomplish nothing today. Darn. I'll have to try again tomorrow.

These fungi growing in the tulip-poplar stump are at least a foot across.

 

No more Friday afternoon meetings!

So many endings! The last class, the last exam, the last grades all submitted, but the semester isn't really over until the last Friday afternoon meeting has been adjourned. No more Friday afternoon meetings! That's something to celebrate. Here's hoping that whatever committee I'm assigned to next year won't meet on Friday afternoons--but the only way to find out is to attend another meeting.

Next week I'll attend the annual all-morning meeting in which Faculty Council sets committee assignments for next year. Last year I left that meeting early because my brother called and told me that I'd better hit the road if I wanted to see Dad before he died. I still didn't make it in time. This year I intend to keep a low profile to avoid being appointed chair of anything and hope for a committee that doesn't meet on Friday afternoons.

Last Friday afternoon I was with the grandkids, providing some backup while my daughter is singing all over Italy with her choir. I got to take the adorables to playgrounds and T-ball practice and preschool and church and I only lost track of two-thirds of them one time. Yes, I had to grade final exams while keeping half an eye on rambunctious imps, but the work got done despite distractions.

And then I had to submit reports on students who earned D or F grades, which included one-third of the students in one of my classes. In every case, students who earned a D or F had failed to submit a major assignment--didn't show up for an exam, didn't submit an essay. They also struggled on other assignments, but a big fat 0 puts a pretty significant dent in the final grade. Sometimes showing up matters.

Yesterday 20 people showed up for the workshop I'd arranged for current and future department chairs, and they were a really fun bunch. Now I've got my work cut out me for fall: to revise and complete the chairs' manual and prepare a whole different workshop in August. But I've got the whole summer to work on that so I certainly don't need to even think about it after sitting through my final Friday afternoon meeting. 

I feel like celebrating but somehow I just don't have the energy. 

Take me out to the T-ball game

The boy in the batter's box swings and misses, swings again and falls over, swings again and finally hits a slow dribbler into the infield, where three little boys pounce on the ball and wrestle over it until one emerges triumphant with the ball in his mitt but neglects to throw it to first base.

We are at T-ball practice and I am in awe of the patience of the coaches, who have their hands full trying to urge nine little boys to keep their eyes on the ball, their helmets on their heads, their bats off their shoulders, and their feet on the field. The boys demonstrate varying levels of talent, from the kid who wields the bat as if it were a sledge-hammer but runs like the wind to the one who catches the ball reliably but then throws it straight up into the air as if the Man in the Moon were playing first base.

Even the best players sometimes get distracted. Who can track an approaching baseball when so many cool dandelions demand attention? Why run to first base when you'd rather run to Mommy in the stands? We all know there's no crying in baseball, but T-ball is to baseball as the lightning bug is to the lightning. Crying happens. So does fighting, and burping, and dancing.

My grandson hits the ball pretty well but gets extra style points for the waggle-dance he does in the batter's box. His competitive streak comes out when he runs the bases: he wants to run faster than anyone else, but in a game he won't be allowed to pass other runners on the basepath, even if they're slow or running backward or hopping like a frog.

Of course there's no guarantee that there will be other runners. Getting on base is not, apparently, every player's highest priority. One little boy hits the ball and then immediately runs out to retrieve it himself, which, in a game, would be a pretty effective method of tagging himself out. Another hits the ball, drops the bat (an important step many neglect), and runs straight to third base. 

Parents in the stands sit stoically or call out encouragement ("Keep your eyes on the ball!") or, occasionally, laugh. I suppose there are T-ball parents who forget that these are small children practicing a game where the stakes are pretty low--I mean, nobody's going to be scarred for life because he tripped over his own feet at T-ball practice, unless a demanding parent makes a huge deal out of it and can't let it go. At some point every player on the field is bound to do something ridiculously childlike, which is appropriate since they are, in fact, children. They deserve a round of applause just for showing up and providing the rest of us so much free entertainment, laughter, and joy.