Bloom
seasons
Final Sunday
The last Sunday before I head back to school; the kids have one more week.
Thus ends summer 2019.
VBS 1
Years and years ago, I spent a few weeks of summers in the north of Poland, in the lake district, working at a camp for young Poles looking to improve their language ability. After a year of teaching, spending several weeks teaching some more wasn’t something I was looking forward to, but the money was decent, and I was there with friends, old and new.
The days started with lessons and ended with sports. I did a session on blues — native Polish teachers of English found it interesting, but the kids, who were into techno, not so much. That’s about all I remember of it, other than the routine of it. Up for breakfast, a couple of sessions, then off to sports after lunch.
Still, there was something pleasant about those mornings. Knowing that I wasn’t teaching toward some test or other, knowing that fun was the operative word (even if I didn’t provide it consistently for my young charges), I enjoyed working in a new place with new kids.
Today was the first day of Vacation Bible School. I agreed to serve as photographer for the camp, so instead of dropping the kids off and heading off to accomplish something or other, I went about snapping pictures.
Over 300 pictures, and only one I can post here…
Back to School
I’ve had enough experience teaching now to realize that my worries about returning to school after spring break — potential laziness, potential mutiny, potential problems of every sort — are almost always unfounded. The first week back is almost always painless. But it’s busy, getting used to the schedule again.
This week was the last week before testing. Our school has decided to do the state-mandated testing a little differently this year, and I applaud the decision. Instead of having a week of eighth-grade testing, where we test day after day after day (math, then English, then science, then social studies), followed by a week of seventh-grade testing and a third week of sixth-grade testing (divided by grade because we still don’t have enough Chromebooks for the whole school to test at the same time), we’re testing one day a week for four weeks. Next week we begin, and once those four weeks of testing are over, the school year is almost over. Perhaps that’s what makes the transition from spring break always a bit easier: we all know we have that final push until the big break.
It’s also the time of year that students who are at risk of failing a given class — students who throughout the whole year have usually done very little other than disrupt class — decide they might want to try to do something to save themselves. There’s always one or two who don’t, and they usually move on the ninth grade anyway through this or that administrative and summer school magic. I’m not putting down our school: it’s a phenomenon that occurs throughout the country, I suspect. But I do have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, what will keeping these students back accomplish? It’s not like they’re going to behave any differently if they repeat. Because our district — perhaps state? never cared enough to check into it — has a policy that a child cannot fail two years, they’re just going to get pushed on, and if they have already been held back, they know they can’t be held back again, which probably prompts a lot of the apathetic behavior. (Students have told me, “I’ve already failed one grade: you can’t hold me back again.”)
On the other hand, isn’t this just teaching them a wonderful lesson for the future? “I can do nothing and still succeed!” What happens to them when they get to high school and the rules change? I’ve told several students over the years, “When you get to high school and fail freshman English, they don’t say, ‘Well, he was close. Let’s give it to him.’ They say, ‘Try again.’ And if it looks like you’re going to fail a second time, they don’t say, ‘Well, he’s already failed once. Let’s move him on.’ They say, ‘Nope. Try a third time.'” And by then, they’re old enough to drop out, and they do. What happens to them when they try to keep a job with that kind of thinking? In short, they don’t. They can’t.
So this is the time of year all of this swirls through my head, and I find myself thinking about my own responsibilities. It’s much easier for me, regarding paperwork and the like, just to move the kid on as well. It’s much easier for me to make my class almost impossible to fail. I think to myself, “They’re still kids: they’ll grow out of it.” But I look around at some millennial young adults and find myself thinking, “Well, maybe not.”
It’s also the time when thoughts and plans for summer are solidifying. This time last year I was getting a little nervous about the huge project that was looming on the horizon. I didn’t know what all was behind the walls, what all awaited us. And now I know what’s behind the walls because I put it there, and the only thing that awaits us in the kitchen is a bright, open space now.
But plans are just that, and now it’s time to get planting, get mowing, get weeding — all the joys of spring that just leave you exhausted but strangely satisfied.
And time to play guitar with your neighbor.
Sunday
After Mass during the school year, there are a few obligatories: a fresh pot of coffee and something sweet. Feed the soul, then feed the spirit. Something like that. Perhaps accompany it with something to read, maybe a game of chess. But eventually, it’s time for the trial and treasure, for it’s something K loves and loathes doing. Polish lessons.
The love is easy: it’s her language, her culture, that she’s sharing with her beloved daughter. The loathe comes from the frustration that sometimes accompanies it. Perhaps “loathe” is not the right word — perhaps it was just too alliterative to pass up. “It’s something that K loves and that frustrates her” doesn’t quite make it. Always searching for the right word, never able to find it, which is what makes the Polish lessons so frustrating for the Girl. Her passive vocabulary, like everyone’s, is much larger than her active vocabulary. She can understand more than she can say, like me in Polish.
E, on the other hand, has of late only a passive vocabulary for the most part. The production has ceased. However, we’re seeing that language and such is perhaps just not his strength. He can watch a cartoon about how airplanes fly and remember it long afterward. (Language, though? K was trying to teach him a Polish prayer the other evening, and he replied, “You must be kidding me! I can’t remember that!”)
In the evening, it’s time to feed the soul once again — a quiet bonfire in the backyard. The temperatures have cooled, the mosquitoes have disappeared, and we’ve entered our favorite time of the year.
We’ve been waiting all summer for this. The kitchen is mostly done, our routines have returned, the weather has cooled, and it’s time to start everything again. So what better way to end than with a song by Antoine Dufour, a Quebecois guitarist, who wrote a song for his yet-unborn son, a song about waiting, a song I’ve listened to at least a dozen times this weekend. Perhaps the most beautiful acoustic guitar song I’ve ever heard.
Autumn Sunday
It’s during this time of year that the early morning sun is so spectacular. It’s not that the leaves are kaleidoscopic for they’re all still green here in the South. It’s the angle of the sun at this time of year.
“It’s the best time of the year in South Carolina,” K always says. Sunny cool days that invite backyard play.
And it’s time to begin decorating — first Halloween. Pumpkin ghosts to hang on our Crepe Myrtles in the front yard.
Of course, there’s always time for the sandbox.
What To Do on a Hot Afternoon
First Day at the Pool
Spring Planting
Another unbelievably sunny morning. Perfect for what we’d planned for the day: spring planting, which the weather and our schedule has put off for two weeks.
First task: purchases. We drove across town to our favorite nursery to pick up veggies and flowers, but the Boy decided that he must — simply must — run like a maniac.
“E, if you don’t stay with me,” I explained, wondering how much he understands. At what point can a child understand cause and effect? Certainly not his age, but we must begin at some point. “If you don’t stay with me, we’ll go to the car.”
He ran off; we headed to the car.
The Boy spent the rest of the visit fussing in his car seat; I spent the rest of the visit listening to the Magliozzi brothers on Car Talk with accompanying screams, cries, and general tantrum-related noises from the back seat.
In the meantime, the Girl picked out flowers with K, always drawn to the most expensive flowers: six, seven bucks for one. In the end, K bought her one expensive flower — a lovely blue and white blossom that is completely unknown to me and will be for all time, as inept with flowers as I am — and several less expensive but equally lovely varieties.
The rest of the day was a furry of preparing the raised beds (which took most of the rest of the morning), and planting, planting, planting. Then came the grilling, grilling, grilling. And more time with the grandparents.
And finally, after the bathing, bathing, bathing, some relaxing for K and me.We finished up a Coen brothers’ film (Inside Llewyn Davis — how can a protagonist be so utterly unlikable?) and then just sat on the couch, TV off, the sounds of the evening pulling us to bed, though for me, not so directly.
A good day.
Sticks and Blossoms
Read moreYou can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Morning Walk
Blue skies in the morning, and there’s only one thing to do: take a walk. It’s been almost two years now since I was taking daily walks with the Boy in the summer mornings. School was just out; the Boy was able to do little more than open his eyes and look straight ahead. On this lazy Sunday morning, with Polish Mass in the afternoon (the last Sunday of the month comes around with surprising suddenness), we have the time for such a trip back through time.
The difference, of course, is in the air, in the trees, in the flowerbeds. The walks two years ago with the Boy were in the summer, when the temperature could rise to the mid-80’s by late morning; today, there’s a cold breeze that reminds us it’s still March.
During the summer walks of two years ago, the shade of trees brought relief; today, the trees are still almost completely bare, and shade only makes us feel the chill more acutely.
Then, the flowerbeds were not nearly as colorful as the beds today.
Then was a beginning, with E just a little bump in the stroller; today is a beginning, with the buds opening and the Boy kicking his feet on the wheels of the stroller and doing his best to chat with me about everything he sees.
“You really want to talk, don’t you?” I ask as we turn to head home.
“Taaaak!”
Green Feet
Every summer it was the same: shoes came off in May and stayed off unless we were riding bikes. The bottoms of our feet went from light green in the early summer, a shade that we could bathe off daily, to dark forest green in August, a color that was almost impossible to scrub out.
We start now.
Evening in the Yard
Spring is here?
My Tongue Twister
Do icy icicles ice on icy icicles? Icy icicles ice on icicles.
I like this because it’s winterish, and now it’s winter.
This isn’t the perfect winter, though. My perfect winter is snowy. Poland snow! That means it’s higher than a horse.
I saw snow that deep on Curious George. They were at their country house. And it started snowing and they didn’t know. But then, the snow was higher than their house and came into their house. So then the Man with the Yellow Hat had to clean it up. I wish I had that much snow I could play in the snow and make a snow angel and eat snow. I once did eat snow. It was freezing cold and white. I spit half of it out.
This is the first of probably many posts by the Girl. She tells me what to write; I write. — gls
Leaves
When you have a backyard like ours, with so many huge trees with so many thousands upon thousands of leaves, there’s only one thing to do on a late-November afternoon. It takes a bit of work at first, but the Girl loves work when it’s play — a sort of Tom Sawyer in reverse.
Yet quickly enough, the fun begins.
The Girl remembers from last year the fun of jumping in the leaves, but she’s forgotten — or simply not realized — the fact that she weighs significantly more this year. And this means a harder impact, for leaves don’t provide as much cushion as a five-year-old might assume.
The Boy, on the other hand, takes a totally different approach. Calm, curious he sits among the leaves and wiggles his feet, swings his arms, and enjoys the newness of the situation.
It’s easy to credit this to his age, but there’s a personality difference that’s indisputable.
There’s a certain explosiveness to the Girl (“You think?” responds everyone who’s ever met her.) that finally finds direction, throwing leaves here, there, and just about everywhere.
The amount of leaves in her hair after this little adventure astounds. And we haven’t even begun burying each other.
Still, we sometimes manage to get her calmed down within the near proximity of the Boy for a portrait.
But the calm doesn’t last.
Still, it wouldn’t be the same family if it did.
Sunday Downtown
We never made it to Falls Park during our walk yesterday, so the family decided to start there today. I would have guessed, were someone to ask me, that we were too late to get much of an autumnal view, but I was happily mistaken.
This time, though, we took the whole family, including our one-and-a-half tooth Wonder Boy who seems willing to smile at just about anything.
The Boy’s smile probably had something to do with my wiggling fingers and silly face, but with colors like this, though, who could resist a smile?
As we headed into the main downtown area of the park, the sun came out fully and consistently, making the Peace Center glow. We, though, were less glowing, especially the Girl, who had by then adopted an all-too-familiar refrain: “I’m hungry.”
Nothing is quite as filling on a fall day as an ice cream cone,
and it never tastes as better than when outside. Or so someone told me.
Pumpkin Patch
We first went in 2007: a Girl, a camera, wonderful afternoon light, and lots of time.
The next year, we took a photo that was a personal favorite picture for a very long time — still is, in fact. Our first year in the pumpkin patch and the Girl was exceedingly playful. Giggles all afternoon.
The next year, it was the same. It was a photo shoot that almost shot itself: all I had to was point and shoot, literally. The Girl took care of all the rest. She was so easily excited, and almost everything thrilled her instantly and completely.
By 2010, she was a little lady. Photos were fine, but they had to be in some meaningful context. Gone were the days of, “Put her by that pumpkin” and clicking away. She wanted to help. She wanted to lift. She wanted to compose.
“I’ll just move this one over and then sit down…”
Today, though, she had competition. And while the Boy was an easy target — he can’t move, so there’s little choice; he can’t talk, so there are few protests — the Girl had other ideas.
The Boy was far too fascinated with the straw and hay to make much of a fuss about anything. The only trick was trying to get him to sit up long enough. Then we hit on the idea of holding him in such a way that the support was not immediately visible. Then we just gave up and shot.
We managed to talk the Girl into a few photos,
but she was far more interested in picking a pumpkin, and even more interested in hauling said pumpkin to the wheelbarrow.
And so I guess we’ll be recreating all the autumnal photo shoots with the Boy that we had with the Girl over the last few years. I can’t imagine more exciting prospects.
Autumn Sun
It’s the angle — no doubt. The sun is hitting the earth at a decreasing angle as the northern hemisphere moves further and further away from the sun. Yet that astro-mechanical explanation somehow doesn’t do justice to the quality of light this time of year. We sit down for an early dinner and the light outside is simply magnetic. One must head out to the deck to get a closer look.
As the sun goes down, though, attention turns to more important things. The Girl can now read a book — a single book — to E. Perhaps in the recent past it would have been more a question of memorization than anything else, but these days, there’s no question she’s reading.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Boy is comprehending.
The New
With temperatures what they are, the new will have to wait. Exploring this or that place with a sweaty infant does not in the least sound entertaining. For anyone.
So a third afternoon out of four at the pool seems the only logical response.