In the news but in the dark

I get a sinking feeling every time my campus ends up in the headlines of the local newspaper. People are going to ask me about that, I tell myself, but what can I tell them that won't make it worse?

Actually, it doesn't even have to be my campus in the news--if higher education hits the national media, I'm going to hear about it from people in my community, often at the most inappropriate of times. Case in point: last month I was at a funeral for someone I cared about when a person I don't even know came up to ask whether my students are getting involved in "all those crazy protests." I guess they assume that anything happening anywhere in academe must also be happening here in rural Ohio.

But sometimes what happens in Ohio doesn't stay in Ohio, so here we are making headlines in all the local media outlets as well as Inside Higher Ed, which helpfully proclaims,  "Incoming President Backs Out of Marietta College Job."

The article is short and lacking in details. Local articles have achieved more length simply by repeating the same statements in different words: No, we can't say why the newly hired president decided not to come here, aside from the aforementioned "unforeseen change in personal considerations"; yes, we have a plan moving forward; no, no further information will be forthcoming at this time.

And the astounding thing is that no further information is forthcoming. Lots of theories are floating around campus without any facts to back them up; even my usual sources of inside scoop are in the dark. So this week while I'm out in the community minding my own business--shopping or attending a play or going to church--and someone walks up to ask me what's going on with the presidential situation, I will honestly be able to say, Beats me. I don't know any more than you do.

Pining for peace of mind

Step out my front door and the whole world smells like a pine-scented candle. 

Last Friday a local tree service cut down a tree that has been threatening to fall on my house for years, a 90-foot-tall white pine conveniently located between two sets of power lines just uphill from the part of the house where the grandkids sleep when they visit. The power company had brutally trimmed off all the branches on the uphill side of the tree years ago, which probably led to the tree's eventual decline. The resident woodsman has taken down many massive trees over the years but the proximity of power lines made this one especially dangerous, and since the power company declined to take responsibility, we finally hired a tree service to take it out.

The bad news is that the patch of wild mullein that sat just downhill from the tree got flattened, but better to flatten some wildflowers than my house. No more pine-scented nightmares but plenty of pine-scented air. That's a pretty good trade. I'll pay the tree service a small fortune, but it's a small price for peace of mind.

The mullein patch before the tree was cut

Hard to see, but there's a power line in front of the rig and another behind the tree.

Mullein patch after the tree was cut

Plenty of firewood to heat the house all winter

 

 

One vast network of influence

On Saturday morning I had breakfast with a retired English professor who, back in the fall of 1980, taught me freshman composition and served as my academic advisor. On learning that I hadn't selected a major yet, he wrote on my final project the following prophetic words: "If you don't go into English, I shall go into mourning."

He's retired now but still interested actively encouraging his former students, some of whom were in attendance at my 40-year college reunion over the weekend. At a party celebrating the 100th birthday of the women's dorm where I'd lived, I ran into a classmate who had been in that same freshman comp class. We remembered carrying our electric typewriters out to the lobby after lights-out to type up our English papers and then staying up all night typing other students' papers so we could earn enough money to pay our way home for the holidays. 

She recalled how our composition professor would sometimes carry his guitar into the classroom on Fridays and lead us in singing at the beginning of class, usually concluding with "Lord of the Dance." My classmate suggested that we go and find our former prof and sing him "Lord of the Dance," but I suggested that she make it a solo. She's always had a gorgeous voice, and I still can't carry a tune in a bucket. Some things never change.

The dorm room I stayed in wasn't much different from the one where I'd lived all those years ago except for the blessed addition of air conditioning, a godsend given the oppressive heat in central Kentucky this weekend. Every student who lived in the dorm back in my day had a box fan in the window for those sweltering September days. The place has been spiffed up significantly over the years but somehow the dorm bed I slept this weekend in was much smaller than I'd remembered. 

I stayed in a room right above the old college newspaper office where I'd spent so many hours writing articles and doing paste-up, but the newspaper offices are now located in the state-of-the-art mass media building on the other side of campus. The old paste-up table and wax machine are probably rusting in a landfill somewhere.

The first person I encountered when I got out of my car was the former youth director from my home church in Florida, and the first event I attended on Friday afternoon was a talk where a woman I mentored when she was around 12 years old read from her recently published book. The minute I walked in the door, she pulled me into a big hug and started gleefully recalling all the fun we'd had back when I was a college student and she was a preteen who loved to read and write and tell stories. Once I took her and two other girls to the National Storytelling Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, where we listened to master storytellers all day and then, after dark, sat on a blanket in a cemetery listening to ghost stories as fireflies lit up the night. After an exhausting day, the girls took turns telling their own stories as I drove them home in the dark.

Now one of those girls whose creativity I'd encouraged is the Vice President for Student Life at my alma mater, and there she was on Friday masterfully telling stories she'd gathered into a book, and there she was yesterday giving the keynote address in front of a thousand people in Hughes Auditorium. Not so long ago it would have been considered sacrilegious for a woman to preach in those hallowed halls, but there she was preaching one of the most inspiring sermons I've ever heard--and I've heard a lot. She's come a long way from that little girl telling spooky stories in a dark car.

And I guess a lot of us have come a long way. One of my classmates served as a pastor in China for 35 years until Covid sent him home, and now he preaches in Mandarin every Sunday at a Chinese church in South Carolina. Culture shock, anyone? I had dinner with classmates who served as missionaries in Ecuador for many years and lunch with friends who'd served in Spain, and I felt a little bit provincial for being a mere English professor in rural Ohio.

This morning I ran into an old friend who was on the newspaper staff when I was editor, a guy I recall as a fidgety firebrand and iconoclast who was always asking the kinds of questions that can get college students into trouble. Forty years ago I wouldn't have pegged him as a future college professor but he finally finished his PhD and he's still fighting the good fight, trying to instill journalistic ethics and writing skills in college students who wouldn't know what to do with a paste-up table or wax machine. He thanked me for putting up with his foibles all those years ago and helping him harness his energy into a long career as a seeker of truth.

I didn't see any online influencers at my reunion but I felt myself enmeshed in a vast network of positive influence: the youth pastor who helped me navigate the rough waters of adolescence, the English professor who helped me find my calling, the newspaper staffers whose gifts I helped shape, the little girl whose creativity I encouraged and who is now going on to inspire thousands of people all over the world. I may be just one small link in this vast network of influence, but the energy that flows through that network reaches beyond the limits of time and space and feels like it could change the world.

My old newspaper buddy, still fighting the good fight.

 

First everything, then everything else

Fifteen years ago this week our house was buzzing with bridesmaids and relatives; one minute young people were setting off fireworks in the meadow and the next they were practicing swing-dancing in the garage. One day a host of strong voices sang their hearts out in harmony as their classmate played on a majestic pipe organ, and the next day friends and family gathered in the yard for a picnic while the neighbor's combo played old-time music. All this in celebration of our daughter's wedding--the high point of what turned out to be a roller-coaster year.

There's a reason I refer to 2009 as The Year Everything Happened, and it would be easy to focus entirely on the most horrible thing that happened--the cancer diagnosis that led me to believe I'd be lucky to be alive for five more years. But fifteen years later I see cancer as just one twist in a thrill ride that led, eventually, to a happier place. How did we get here?

Early in 2009 I switched from film to digital photography, took a class in Scientific Imaging and learned to use PhotoShop, all in preparation for taking thousands of photos of birds and bees and flowers and family and joyful celebrations.

My experience taking the Scientific Imaging class inspired an essay that I delivered at a conference and later published in the journal Pedagogy. In a banner year for scholarship, I delivered papers at three academic conferences in 2009--Pittsburgh in March, British Columbia in June, Philadelphia in December. Never before had I delivered three papers in one year, and probably never again. 

In spring I finished my term as English Department Chair and was elected Chair of the Faculty, but in the fall I had to hand over the gavel to an interim Faculty Chair when cancer treatment made it impossible to fulfill my duties. In spring I celebrated the opening of our new campus library and in summer I moved into a brand-new office over there to serve as the inaugural Director of the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence--another role I had to postpone until after I was done with treatment.

In spring a beloved colleague announced her retirement plan just weeks before being diagnosed with a cancer that rapidly proved fatal. (We had the same oncologist.)

In May I attended my daughter's college commencement and watched her confidently leading hundreds of people in singing at the Baccalaureate service. We'd shopped for wedding clothes, paid deposits, attended showers, and poured heart and soul into designing a joyful series of wedding-related events. In June it all came together in a service so beautiful it made me smile right down to my toes. What a blessing to welcome a wonderful young man into the family and watch the happy couple ride off into an unknown future full of possibility.

Ten days later I went to the hospital for a routine hysterectomy and came home with a diagnosis of endometrial cancer, with a five-year survival rate just a little better than 50/50. The roller-coaster had hit its high point and was quickly careening downhill toward a series of heart-wrenching twists and turns: an allergic reaction to the first chemotherapy drug followed by months of chemo that took away my hair, my energy, my sense of taste, and my dignity. Radiation treatments, every weekday for five weeks. Steroid buzz, brain fuzz, toenails falling off, a constant need to be aware of the location of the nearest bathroom.

A dead car--how could I get to chemo? My brother gave me his ancient Volvo wagon, which doggedly kept me going for years afterward. Friends and colleagues stepped up to adorn my bald head with hats and scarves, drive me to early-morning appointments, deliver my favorite brand of ginger ale, and encourage me when the simplest tasks seemed hopeless. After I had a port installed to make chemotherapy delivery easier, a friend drove me home in her convertible with the top down, which made me feel like the Grand Marshal of the Survivors' Parade. Another friend wrote my cancer treatment theme song, "Kicking Cancer's Butt," and cheered me during the long hours connected to an IV at the cancer center.

In the fall of 2009 I taught an honors class in humor theory and took great comfort in the joy my students brought into my life. They picked up the slack when I was just barely getting by, and I'll never forget their hard work and compassionate care. "I'm holding you in the light," said one student, and I've often passed that promise on to others.

We were blessed with a garden that produced so many habanero peppers that we had to share the joy. My husband made enough habanero jelly to heat up the palates of all our pepper-loving relatives and friends. Habanero jelly may be the perfect metaphor for that eventful year: blistering heat wrapped in smooth, sweet bliss.

I had my final round of chemotherapy a few days before Thanksgiving and then lounged around recovering while the rest of the family did all the holiday cooking. In December my husband and his twin brother celebrated their 100th birthday (50 years each!) and we welcomed a bouncing baby chainsaw into the household. My husband managed to sing in the community production of Handel's Messiah despite having slipped on ice and torn his rotator cuff hours before the performance.

By the end of the year I almost felt like singing too: my hair was coming back and I was looking forward to resuming many of my academic duties. I was eager to put 2009 behind me--but not all of it. I wanted to forget the parts when the roller-coaster dropped into a bottomless abyss and then wrenched me around brutally, but I desperately held on to the high points: the wedding, the supportive friends, the comedy class, the habanero jelly.

Fifteen years ago I didn't think I'd be alive today, but think of what I would have missed if the doctors hadn't caught my cancer: my son's college graduation, the births of my three grandchildren, the publication of a bunch of articles and a collection of essays, a teaching prize that allowed me to pay off my medical debts, a return to the Worthington Center, a chance to assist my parents in their declining years, my nephew's wedding, so many great students, so many great books, so many meaningful moments with family and friends and, sometimes, simply with myself, so many photos and hikes and canoe trips and peppers and peach pies and all the mundane pleasures of life.

I've never experienced another year quite like 2009, which is just as well because it nearly killed me. For a time I feared that The Year Everything Happened would be the end of me, but instead it became the beginning of Everything Else. 

Eventually the roller-coaster glides to a stop and we lucky ones get to step out of the car and put our feet back on solid ground. Maybe nothing particularly interesting is happening there, but we get to keep walking forward, and sometimes that's enough.

Tastes like summer

A sign at the farm stand said the peaches were "so fresh the juice will run down your arms," but at first they were so hard I had to seal them in a paper bag to ripen up for a couple of days. Finally, though, they were soft enough to live up to their hype so I transformed them into possibly the best peach pie I've ever made, with a touch of ginger in the filling and a nearly-perfect crust. I always feel like I need a bath after peeling and slicing peaches and I keep finding sticky spots in the kitchen where the juice splattered, but good gracious me there's nothing better than a good peach pie. Tastes like summer.

Feels like summer too. I went out to mow around 7 a.m. to beat the heat, but the humidity was already oppressive. By the time I'd finished mowing, I was drenched with sweat and the air was too thick to breathe. Heat wave! But from the big front window I can see my bottlebrush buckeye just getting ready to blossom and I'm eager to get back out there when it starts attracting butterflies, birds, and hummingbird moths.

We had a subdued Fathers Day because my husband works on Sunday mornings and comes home wanting to do nothing but sleep, but this one was even more complicated because of some sad news: his aunt, who has been ill for some time, died early Sunday morning. This would be a real loss to the family even if she were just an aunt, but she is the aunt who helped raise my husband and his two brothers after their parents died, the aunt who encouraged my husband to develop his musical gifts and paid for his voice lessons, the aunt who was everyone's cheerleader and never had a negative word to say about anyone. She will be sorely missed.

So now we await word on when the funeral will take place. Once again a loved one has had the audacity to die without checking my schedule first, but I will not be so petty as to complain about the timing. Instead I'll complain about the weather. After all, that's what it's there for.

Better yet, I'll nab a piece of that peach pie--the sweetness of summer in every mouthful.

If these desks could talk

That's my last desk standing against the wall, a simple but elegant chunk of sturdy hardwood destined to hold my yet-to-be-purchased home computer, with a keyboard drawer and ample space to support a large-screen monitor (because nothing fatigues my eyes more than staring at my tiny laptop screen). I hope this will be the last desk I'll ever buy.

The first desk I ever bought sits in the foyer, where it serves as a catch-all for all manner of transient stuff: mail and recyclables, weed-whacker line and earplugs, a whole drawer full of retired camera equipment and another full of CDs and cassette tapes. I bought that desk more than 40 years ago for $20 at a yard sale. It was yellow, but not for long. Our first computer, a clunky beige cube, sat on that desk--we pulled out the center drawer and flipped it upside-down to hold the keyboard. I wrote my Master's thesis at that desk and my husband wrote dozens of seminary papers and early sermons.

When our kids needed desks for their schoolwork and projects, we bought small used desks for their rooms--rudimentary but useful, bought with pocket change at yard sales. Those desks are long gone, as is the big computer desk that sat downstairs. It was a Christmas gift from my in-laws in the early 1990s, arriving as a flat box full of parts that required careful assembly. I wrote my dissertation at that desk and my husband wrote hundreds more sermons, and it followed us on every move until we finally gave it away a few years ago. Too big for the available space and battered after years of heavy use, it was easily the ugliest piece of furniture I've ever owned. But maybe someone else is getting some use out of it now.

At one point we had six desks at home and more in our offices but now we're down to four at home and three at our workplaces, which still seems excessive--but what can I say? I love a good desk. In the early 1990s we bought two desks at once when a local furniture store was going out of business. One of those desks now sits in an awkward space between the living room and kitchen, where it holds note cards, envelopes, gift bags, ribbons, tape, and writing supplies; for a few years the bottom drawer has been stuffed with coloring books, crayons, and markers for the grandkids' use. 

The other desk is my favorite to look at but not to sit at, with a cramped and uncomfortable desktop and handy nooks providing display space for our collection of chicken tchotchkes (harking back to the era when my husband's family ran a hatchery). Its upper shelves hold my cookbook collection, and the drawers store more CD's and miscellaneous junk than two people could ever possibly need.

I love the two desks I use on campus, but they're not really mine; at some point I'll clear them out and they'll pass to other people. My new desk will serve my post-retirement needs--as soon as I buy a home computer. More than forty years after my desk-buying journey began, I think I'm finally done.  

My first desk, formerly yellow.

My last desk.

Desk full of writing supplies.

The tall desk, attractive but uncomfortable.

One junk drawer is not enough.

Coloring books, crayons, markers.

Just a few of the chicken tchotchkes.

Another desk, another junk drawer.

So many cookbooks!

 

A knack for naming

My oldest grandkid would like to be an astronaut but I think she could pursue an alternate career in naming space vehicles. Move over, Spirit, Opportunity, Apollo, and Voyager; Miss E would like to introduce you to Hope, Possibility, Bigs, Apple, Creativity, Shadow Storm, and--Smurf?

Except those are not names of space vehicles. No: they're cauliflower plants. Because if a kid loves cauliflower and is determined to grow some in her family garden plot, then of course she's going to give those coddled cauliflower plants names.

My granddaughter introduced me to her cauliflower patch when we went to water the garden Saturday morning. It was my grandson's birthday so he was enjoying his Yes Day, which gave him the power to determine how the family spent its Saturday. First things first: we all went out to a you-pick orchard to gather buckets of cherries, raspberries, and strawberries. Gardening came next, with the birthday boy filling watering cans so the girls could water the cauliflower and carrots and tomatoes and squash and whatever else they've got growing out there. 

Time speeds up when we're with the grandkids so I'm not sure how we packed so much into a brief visit. Grampa gave the youngest her first unicycle lessons and helped our daughter spread mulch in her gorgeous flower garden, and we all enjoyed a sushi-tastic dinner followed by ice cream cake and "Happy birthday." 

I dream sometimes about living closer to my grandkids so I could enjoy their hijinks more frequently, but in the meantime I get an energy boost every time they introduce me to their latest project.

Especially if it's a cauliflower named Smurf.

Free unicycle lessons, courtesy of Grampa

Introducing the cauliflowers

Watering the garden

News too good not to share

First, the tiny wrens in the nest in my weed-whacker's battery compartment seem to be thriving. I angled the camera just right to get a lousy photo, but I can confirm that there are at least three wrens in there dividing their time between sleeping and eating. An adult swooped in to shoo me away and then stood guard nearby giving me the evil eye, but I can accept that. Always good to see a parent diligently protecting the youngsters.

Second, the grant we applied for earlier this spring has been approved, woo-hoo! So now I'll be in charge of planning a series of campus events over the next two months to engage faculty and staff in an interesting project; I'll have to work hard but this could be the start of something really exciting and I'm delighted to be in the middle of it. Plus there's money. Not a ton of money, but it's always a nice thing to have. 

Third, I finally watched American Fiction, the film adapted from Percival Everett's novel Erasure. It fits perfectly into the themes of my African American Literature class this fall--and the ending made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off my chair. A little thought-provoking satire to celebrate the end of the semester--win-win! 

Limbering up the writing muscles

Stiff is how I feel today, in mind and body. The other day I did a bit of house-cleaning that taxed my abilities, and by house-cleaning I mean cleaning the accumulated dirt, algae, and glunk off the siding on three sides of my house. (I can't reach the fourth side without a ladder, and I'm enough of a klutz to know that carrying a long-handled sponge mop and bucket up a ladder will only end in disaster.)

I don't remember when I last cleaned the siding, but it's been long enough to allow my light-gray house to appear to be growing a green beard on the shady spots. I don't want to use the power-washer because the siding was installed by a previous owner who did every home-improvement task in the cheapest and sloppiest possible way, so there are many spaces where a pressure-washer could force lots of water under the siding, which is not optimal. In the past I've used a bucket of cleanser and rags, but this time I repurposed an old sponge mop so I could reach higher with less strain on my shoulders and arms. 

I know no one really wants to do such an annoying task much less read about it, but if my entire upper body hurts today, maybe you'll understand why. Also, I found a nest of hornets. Also, I broke the mop. BUT: it's now possible to sit on the back deck without wondering when the fuzzy green beard on the siding is going to develop sentience and take over the planet.

I'd love to be sitting out there right now thinking deep thoughts and writing them down, but the stiffness that suffuses my body seems to have also crippled my mind. I've been writing steadily for nearly three hours at Writing Wednesday but I don't see a single sentence that makes me light up with pride or want to share it with a reader. 

I'm still at the getting-it-down stage of this writing project, writing as quickly as possible without concern for details, and I see lots of sentences studded with little parenthetical notes like add example or get quote or what year? It's still not clear to me exactly what shape this thing (essay? analysis? pile of dangling insights?) will take, but I've settled on a controlling metaphor that gives me hope that it will all cohere in the end. Yellowjackets are involved. In fact, one of my parenthetical notes asks are yellowjackets cooperative? Guess I need to look some stuff up before my next writing session.

Despite my stiffness, I'm pleased to see that I've produced close to 9,000 words, which is kind of a lot for a piece that doesn't really fit into any preconceived categories. Progress is being made, one chunk of verbiage at a time, and if that progress looks a little sloppy and unpolished, it coordinates nicely with the whole rest of my life right now. 

I think I'll have one more week in the getting-it-down stage before I turn toward the cleaning-it-up stage, at which point I'll need answers to all those parenthetical questions. I won't need ladders or mops or buckets, just a supple mind and some swiftly-moving fingers. I wake up every morning with fingers so stiff I can barely grab my glasses, but a long bout of typing limbers them up nicely. I only hope it's limbering up my brain cells at the same time. 

Return of the wrens, with bonus beauty

Kinda glad I was wrong about the wrens. 

A week or so ago I went out to fetch the weed-whacker from the recycling shed but found that Carolina wrens had built a nest in the battery compartment and tucked into the nest were five tiny eggs. So I left it alone. Weed-whacking could wait. 

Around mid-week when I checked on the nest, the eggs were gone and I didn't see any baby wrens--just a smear of dark fuzz. I wondered whether wrens would relocate eggs if a nest felt unsafe, but I feared that predators had found the eggs. Either way, I was resolved to catch up on the weed-whacking on the first dry morning.

That was today. Once again I went out to the recycling shed all kitted out in my weed-whacking gear--earplugs, eye protection, water bottle, battery, extra spools of weed-whacker line--but when I looked in the nest, that little smear of fuzz started wiggling.

I don't know how many nestlings survived but I saw at least two. Again, I left them alone and went to get the resident strongman to start up the gas-powered weed-whacker, which is heavier than mine and much more unwieldy and eventually made my upper arms feel like wet spaghetti, but never mind that: the whole time I was weed-whacking, I kept thinking about those baby wrens.

We've heard the adult wrens calling nearby and seen them perched on deck railings near the recycling shed, so I resolved to sit out there with the camera until I could catch a photo of the wrens tending their young. It's not possible to get photos of the nest itself because it's tucked too far back into the dark shed, but I sat for a very long time in the quiet afternoon trying to catch a glimpse of the adults wrens.

I don't know how long I was out there sitting as still as possible on the deck. I heard buzzes and chirps from many birds and a wood thrush calling invisibly in the woods, and from down near the creek came the sound of a deer huffing and snorting. Maybe my presence spooked the wrens because they didn't show up for a long while, but then I saw one calling from a pine bough and then scavenging for bugs in the tulip poplar right next to the deck and then calling and calling and calling from trees along the edge of the yard. When a wren finally approached the nest, it swooped in low so that I barely saw it--but I heard the faint cheeping of the nestlings in response.

The photos are from too far away to be sharp, but I know the wrens will be more comfortable tending to their young if I'm not around, so I went inside.  And now I look out my front window and see a flash of color in the dogwood tree just outside the window--an oriole! Some days I'm so surrounded by beauty I don't even know where to look.

 

 

 

Three cheers for volunteers

I have to admire the hardy catalpa sapling growing alongside our driveway, even though I wish it would just give up already. It's in a bad place for a catalpa tree--way too close to the driveway. Who knows how it arrived there? Some bird or woodland creature may have brought the seed, and it keeps leafing out and growing more branches, even though my husband cuts it down every summer.

Catalapa trees are lovely and I wouldn't object to having one somewhere, but just not there. If the branches grow any longer, they'll be scraping against our cars. But how do you get rid of a volunteer that just doesn't want to go away?

From the moment we moved in here 20 years ago, we've had to deal with a host of volunteers, some more welcome than others. In early spring the redbud trees along the edge of the woods provide a burst of color, and even now the heart-shaped leaves look lovely. We've tried in the past to dig up and relocate some saplings, but they do a much better job of spreading themselves. 

The pawpaw trees bring tiny attractive blooms in spring and, if we're lucky, a healthy harvest of fruit in the fall. The fruit gives us seeds that we've planted in hopes of producing new saplings to plant in other parts the property, but only this year have we finally managed to grow pawpaw saplings in pots. 

Other volunteers also benefit by encouragement. Years ago I dug up a clump of daisies and moved them near my driveway, and they've seeded themselves each year until they've formed a swath of cheery blossoms next to where I park. Likewise the wild columbines I dug up from a ditch and transplanted to my front garden: they reseed themselves and invade every available spot, bringing flowers and beautiful foliage and interesting seed pods nodding on their  stems.

Behind the house near the shed we're watching two mullein plants, one much bigger than the other. Mullein blossoms in its second year and only if winter gets sufficiently cold, so this year I'm carefully avoiding mowing them down in hopes that next summer we'll see tall stalks covered in blooms--plus the pollinators they attract.

In the past few years we've had to cut down two massive tulip poplars, but tulip poplar saplings keep popping up to replace their elders. The tiny ones growing amid clumps of volunteer jewelweed close to the driveway won't last, but several others show signs of stepping up to the challenge of survival.

And then there are the hollyhocks. I don't remember how long ago my daughter planted hollyhocks in my front garden, but they eventually died out there--but not before reseeding themselves all over the place. I never know where they're going to pop up, but this year they're blooming beautifully down near the wood pile.

A more diligent gardener would take these wildly unpredictable plants and make them conform to some master plan, but I prefer to stand back and see what they can do on their own or with a little encouragement. And even while that persistent catalpa threatens to invade my space, I have to admire its ability to keep coming back and sprouting leaves despite all our efforts to curtail its growth. Life finds a way! (But we need to prevent it from clawing at our cars.)

 

Brand-new catalpa leaves

Mullein

Stubborn catalpa sapling

Pawpaws growing in pots

Redbud

Tiny tulip poplar sapling

Hollyhock

 

That's what I like about life in the slow lane

Summer break: when time loses all meaning and the days blur together in an amorphous blob. I get up in the morning and don't know what day it is; I have things to do (probably) and I know I'll get to them (eventually), but the sense of urgency disappears as soon as the semester is over. My husband helpfully asks what time I need to get out the door, and the answer, usually, is I don't really need to be anywhere.

Except on Sundays (church). And on days when I have meetings concerning a grant proposal that's eating up a bunch of my time (and will eat up more if it's approved, not that I'm complaining). And on Wednesdays, when I get out of the house bright and early to join a group of colleagues in a room in the library where we sit silently and write all morning. The first Writing Wednesday of summer break attracted seven people, including a few newbies, and I made significant progress on my new writing project. 

An article that originated in Writing Wednesdays a few years ago finally saw the light of day in the journal Pedagogy. "Ink, Blood, Bones" may well be my final foray into academic publishing, as I'm currently working on something more like a personal essay immersed in literature, or a literary analysis immersed in personal narrative. I don't quite know how long it will be or where it will end up but I'm having tons of fun writing right now.

Otherwise the days stretch before me without design. Maybe I'll mow, if weather permits. Maybe I'll clean the bathrooms or go for a hike or watch a mystery on Britbox. And if a curious groundhog comes knocking at the door while I'm doing my own thing, I'll pause for a photo shoot and then carry on.

Because that's what summer break is all about: no sense of time, no urgency, just a gentle plodding forward in the faith that eventually I'll do what needs to be done. 

She's been fascinated with my house all week. Why?

 

The early bird catches the weed-whacker, or something like that

Truth be told, I didn't really want to do any weed-whacking this morning, but I failed to come up with a convincing excuse to avoid the annoying chore until I went to fetch the weed-whacker. There I was, kitted out in yard-work clothes, protective goggles, and earplugs, with a freshly wound reel of weed-whacker line in my pocket, a water bottle hanging from my belt loop, and a heavy rechargeable battery in my hand--stopped in my tracks by a Carolina wren.

I didn't see the wren this morning but I heard it nearby, alarmed at my incursion into its nesting site. The weed-whacker was leaning against the back wall of the recycling shed, its battery compartment filled with a new nest--and I know it's new because I removed a similar nest a few weeks ago, except it was empty. This time I found five tiny wren eggs nestled deep within the nest.

Am I willing to sacrifice five incipient wrens to my need for an orderly lawn? No I am not. I put the weed-whacker back carefully, hoping the birds wouldn't be spooked into abandoning the nest. The weeds can wait. The wrens can't. 

Am I willing to let those weeds keep growing undisturbed for the next couple of weeks? No I am not. Fortunately, we have another weed-whacker, but I've never been able to start it. Since the resident he-man isn't home to start it for me, I'll just have to postpone my weed-whacking to another day.

Tragic, I know, but I think I'll get over it.

 

Meandering away from anxiety

All week I've been studiously avoiding all thoughts of campus, but my subconscious won't give me a break--last night it served up an anxiety dream in which I forgot to teach my freshman comp class all semester and then had to scramble to squeeze in all the work in the final week of classes. Ridiculous, of course, especially since I didn't teach composition at all this past academic year. Maybe somewhere deep in my soul there's a tiny piece of me that misses teaching composition, but giving me nightmares isn't the best way to win me over.

Next week I need to get my mind back on campus tasks, but this week I've been trying to focus on other things. Mowing, for instance, and getting my new phone and internet service set up, and then marveling over the fact that for the first time in 20 years we have both high-speed internet service at home and a landline that's not full of static. We can call people! On the phone! Without having to scream what?! into the receiver over and over! For years I've done all our online banking from campus because our home internet was too cranky to keep me connected, but now I can pay my bills at home! And if I need to remind myself of the differences between grasshopper sparrows and Henslow's sparrows, I can Google it and get an answer right away! I mean, it's as if we've finally entered the twenty-first century, a few decades late.

But I won't be at home to play with my new technology for a few days. This morning I took a meandering drive north to visit the grandkids, and along the way I accomplished a few other non-campus-related goals. I started by visiting the birding area at The Wilds, where I saw grasshopper sparrows at exactly the same spot I've seen them before, plus killdeer and tree swallows and brown thrashers and yellow warblers and towhees and robins and turkey vultures and common yellowthroats and I don't know what else. The fog was too thick to allow good photos, but I exulted in the stillness suffused with birdsong.

And then I meandered my way on over to Amish country, which has grown more touristy since last time I visited. I've been hunting for a desk for months, an essential part of my pre-retirement plan. I'll remove the big empty dresser from the guest room, put a computer desk in there, and finally buy my own computer with a big screen so I don't have to kill my eyes with a tiny laptop screen after I finally surrender my college-owned laptop. But I refuse to buy any more furniture that comes in a flat box and they won't let me steal Edith Wharton's desk from The Mount, so for months I've been actively seeking a desk at furniture stores between Charleston and Columbus. Everything is either too massive or too elaborate or too simple or too ugly, a trend that continued today as I hopped in and out of Amish furniture stores in the bustling tourist towns of Sugar Creek, Millersburg, and Wooster. It looks as if the allure of Amish-made furniture has resulted in a burgeoning market for cheap imitations, so I kept being disappointed until I stopped at a tiny store near Orrville just down the road from the Smucker's factory. There I found my desk, and I even managed to squeeze it into the back of my car. 

Now it's time to focus on the task at hand: fun with the grandkids. If their hijinks can't banish campus anxiety from my thoughts, nothing can. What new wonders will they bring into my life? Only time will tell.

 

My trailcam proves to be an overachiever

The wind goeth where it listeth, saith the King James Bible, but we don't use listeth these days so let's just paraphrase and say the wind goes where it wants, and if it wants to keep blowing some leafy undergrowth toward the sensor of a motion-detecting trail camera during a particularly windy April, then you're going to have to scroll through 9900 images of blowing foliage to locate a few pictures of woodland creatures.

But what great creatures they are! Raccoons and possums and deer and squirrels, of course, and plenty of pictures of the neighbor's cat, but this time we captured on camera a lone coyote--blurry and barely there in the dark--and lots of daylight pictures of wild turkeys.

I'm not kidding about the 9000 blowing-bush pictures, though. Granted, it's been a while since we checked the trailcam, but I had no idea that it could store more than 9000 photos at a time. During the winter when the trees and bushes were bare, the trailcam captured far fewer photos; this time, I deleted photos in batches of 500 at a time. If it had been a burning bush instead of a blowing bush then I might have treated it with a little more respect, but I think it's time to move the camera or trim some foliage.

Still, sorting through all those photos was a suitably mindless task for a lazy Mothers Day. Earlier, I read a book my adorable daughter had sent--Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer--while my husband and son put together an impressive Mothers Day dinner, with grilled bratwurst and zucchini and stuffed jalapenos and salads and pastries. Later we walked up the hill to see what's growing and try to track down an indigo bunting (heard but not seen), and along the way my husband grabbed the memory card out of the trailcam. 

And now all those blowing-bush photos have been deleted and I'm ready to call it a day. Goodnight squirrels. Goodnight wind. Goodnight turkeys that made us all grin. Good night possums. Good night deer. Let's get these 9000 pictures out of here. 

 

I need to set some goals, but not today

Finally, after a week of one  long meeting after another, I've entered a brief season of Nothing much. 

What do I need to do today? Nothing much.

What big plans do I have for next week? Nothing much.

What do I think about the College's new strategic plan? Nothing much.

It won't last, of course. I have some pressing summer projects--both at home and on campus--and I'll have even more if a certain grant gets approved. The new strategic plan will have an impact on the training sessions I need to organize for the fall semester, so at some point I'll need to attend to its demands, and I need to put together a senior capstone class on a topic I've never taught before. And of course I'll want to do some fun things this summer too, like see the grandkids and get out in the canoe and plant things (if the rain ever stops).

So I ought to get to work putting together a plan of action, but just for today, I'd rather not. For one thing, I recently looked at the goals I listed on my annual review last fall and realized that every single one of them became impossible after certain funding and staffing changes were announced, so I'm a little sour on the whole goal-setting process at the moment. And then this week I spent an absurd amount of time performing assessment activities so the College can measure how well we're achieving learning outcomes in a class that has recently been cut from the curriculum, so the whole looking-back-and-evaluating thing feels like an exercise in futility.

That kind of exercise wears me out, so I'm looking forward to a whole week with only one meeting on the schedule--with the company that's going to hook our house up to the new fiber-optic cable recently installed all up our street. Yes: for the first time ever, high-speed internet will be available at my house, along with television service (!!) and reliable phone service not eternally filled with static, all for less money than I'm paying for weak, unreliable service right now. 

I could spend the whole rest of the summer so enthralled with my new tech capabilities that I don't get anything else done, but that doesn't sound like me. Before you know it I'll be busy planning and writing and meeting and digging and mowing and sewing and reading, but just for today the only thing I really feel like doing is nothing much.

And if I can do that outside under the blooming tulip poplar, so much the better.

Learning outside our comfort zones

Final grades were due at 9:00 this morning, but the desperate slog through exams and paperwork did not deter two dozen of my colleagues from gathering at 9:30  for an end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. We started by heaving a collective sigh of relief, and then we got down to the important work of learning outside our comfort zones.

We all work hard to create comfortable learning environments for our students, I explained, but they come into these unfamiliar spaces and we ask them to do things they may have never done before, and sometimes that can be terrifying.

Today, I told them, I'm giving you the opportunity to step into their shoes.

But that required stepping out of our familiar classrooms and into spaces where we were not the experts. First, we stepped on stage, where a theatre professor guided us through some basic stage fighting techniques with swords. They may have been stage swords, but they handled with a satisfying heft and clank. We learned that effective stage combat is more dance than battle and that safety requires close attention to everyone around us. 

Then we moved upstairs to the music department to learn that active listening is also essential to musical improvisation. A music prof introduced basic principles of improvisation and then set us loose to practice on percussion instruments. A few genuine musicians were in the room but mostly we were a motley crew drawn from every corner of campus, making noise and matching rhythm patterns and adding our part to the group effort.

One more flight up to the art department and things got really quiet as a host of non-artists learned to draw blind contours in charcoal. I could feel the concentration in the room as historians and scientists and math geeks and administrators and others tried to draw what they saw and not just what they expected to see. The art professor leading the session offered gentle encouragement and found something worth praise in every effort.

When we went downstairs to retrieve our boxed lunches, the entire building was buzzing. We learned that an accident had knocked out power to many parts of campus, including the science complex where we had planned to hold the two afternoon sessions. We put our heads together to figure out how to do the group problem-solving activity in a different venue, but the chemistry lab experience could not safely be relocated so we had to postpone it until the next pedagogy workshop.

After giving our bodies, brains, and creative skills a good workout all morning, we relaxed outside with our lunches and put those active listening skills to good use. Today we proved that we can work together to make good things happen, even when the power goes out and the building starts beeping. We didn't win all the battles or make the best music or draw the perfect charcoal sketch, but we showed that a little imperfection can't stop learning from happening, as long as we're willing to step outside our comfort zones.

I have some pretty fierce colleagues.

And talented, too.

 

Back to my happy place

I went to the woods to escape the floating anger. It wasn't aimed at me, but on Wednesday I kept walking into the trajectory of this shouty mass of formidable feelings so that by the end of the day I felt wounded.

My students' exams were done (and mostly graded, but don't tell my colleagues who are still slaving over student handwriting). I had no meetings scheduled, no duties to perform--just the need to spring into action if a colleague decided to dump a pile of work onto a committee I'm currently chairing. But I didn't want to sit around my office all day awaiting more angry words, so I took a hike.

First I took a drive--90 minutes to my old stomping ground, Lake Katharine State Nature Preserve near Jackson, Ohio. Arrived early to an empty parking lot and set out on the Salt Creek Trail. This may be my favorite hiking trail in the state. Maybe there are other trails out there that would knock my socks off, but of all the Ohio trails I've hiked, this one is the best.

I knew I was too late for most of the spring ephemerals. Bloodroot, dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, and the creepy-looking blue cohosh blossoms have long gone to seed. But a few valiant trilliums and bluebells were still holding on and I saw lots of mayapples, foamflower, jack-in-the-pulpit, violets, and even three cheery clumps of showy orchis. Running buffalo clover doesn't look like anything special but it was long thought to be extinct, so it's a joy to see it thriving in the wild.

Halfway through my hike I sat on a bench along Salt Creek and just listened for a while, soaking in the stillness. A pair of Canada geese honked and dabbled in the burbling water while birds called overhead and the occasional butterfly flittered past. Is this the most peaceful place I know? For the entire two hours I spent in the woods, I didn't see another person or even touch my phone. 

And then when I got back to my car and checked my phone, I saw that a big load of work had been lifted from my shoulders; my committee will not be springing into action this week. Maybe I can carry the stillness and peace of Lake Katharine with me a little longer as protection against the shouty angry voices. If not, at least I'll have something pretty to look at.

club moss

portal to my happy place

magnolia

mayapple

foamflower

trillium

jack-in-the-pulpit

mayapple

solomon's seal

bear corn (in abundance!)

bluebells

canopy of magnolia leaves

reflections of leaves in the creek

pawpaw blossom

running buffalo clover

showy orchis

bellwort and spider