MindSpinner

I will teach next year - and maybe for twenty more years after that - at one of the smallest school districts in my state. I’ll have small classes and lots of hats to wear and a progressive administration and faculty to work with. I like the people already.

Money we will not have, but I’m already used to teaching without much funding, without much technology, etc. The only pinch I will feel will be with regard to books. I want to have good books to put in kids’ hands, and lots of them, books to suit the interests of every reader.

I will have, on the other hand, a big sunny room, the biggest classroom I’ve ever enjoyed. It does, however, need work. I think I’m going to take some before and after pictures just because the “before” is so unbelievable. Tan paint, been there a long time, peeling on one wall. (I’m militating for a paint job in a cheerier color.) The desk ancient, beyond worn. I’ll paint that, too. The room itself a mess. Two utterly dilapidated couches, torn, crooked, one a large brown country floral, the other a nondescript fabric with vinyl cushions - two awful couches combined. Lots of bookshelves (yeah!), lots of boxes, lots of stacks, three cameras lying around, a sizable stuffed duck sitting atop the TV, a carton with three Cokes in the little glass bottles we all like best but never buy anymore because there’s not enough Coke in them for the money. A hodgepodge of tables and student chairs - no desks - great for yearbook and groupwork, maybe not so manageable with 9th grade English students. (The other English teacher wants the tables if I don’t. The other teacher is young. If you’ve been in schools long, you know that, when one teacher clears out, the others descend on the room like locusts to strip it of anything desirable. The room I left at my old school featured a big desk the school had been given by some corporation where desks actually get replaced before their legs fall off. I found that I wasn’t bequeathing that prize to my replacement after all; our department chair snapped it up instead. Anyway, my new young colleague could have already snatched those tables, if he’d wanted them; it’s nice that he didn’t. I’m impressed.)

I figure this room will take days to clean and reorganize. Still, there’s the space and the sunny windows, a whole wall of them, and I’m sure I can figure out what to do with seven or eight big boxes of small-town monopoly games in the back of the room (a doomed fundraising project). Possibilities abound.

I am a gardener. I play botanical favorites all the time, pore over catalogs through the gray months of winter, order too many plants, and wear myself out getting them all in the ground. (It’s June, and I have six red-twig dogwood still to go.) If planting and tending is half of what I do, however, the other half is weeding, culling the upstarts.

This is the first year I’ve discarded a living tree (excluding the annual ritual sacrifice of a severed Frazier fir for the holidays). It was a little crabapple, cultivar unknown, sold cheap off the back of a truck the September after I moved into my new house. It nearly died two years ago, had to be cut way back into a stumpy version of its taller self, and then fell victim to deer scraping the velvet from their antlers. It was diseased.

All these are all excuses. Where it was, truth to tell, I wanted an October Glory Maple. I have gawked at October Glory Maples for years and bought this spring the sort of specimen I could afford: a 3′ sapling, bare root, ordered from Musser Forests. It was a three-year tree, not much more than a rooted stick that grew leaves as the weather warmed. Actual branches will come next year.

Envisioning the vibrant red of the maple in fall and a garden bench couched in its someday shade, I dug up the little crab I had been coaxing along with weekly bucketfuls of water during the dry months. I dug it up with force and determination, shook the dirt from its roots, and threw it back into the woods, out of sight, where there are lots of bits of dead trees - a woody graveyard. I wasted no time. I was being a sensible gardener. I was making a breakthrough, a hard decision. I’d already planted all the trees the yard will hold. There was no place for a sick, stubby crabapple tree that still bloomed bravely in spring. No neighbor would want it. I planted the October Glory Maple in its place and conjured in my mind’s eye the spreading limbs of the shade tree.

Still, I felt like a murderer - there was no residual sense of victory; guilt instead remained. When I had lunch with a former student the day after the deed, I told her about digging up the tree. She wrote an e-mail only today and said, “I hope you’re enjoying your time off and not getting into too much trouble or murdering any more foliage ;->.”

The truth is that we gardeners murder foliage all the time. In a conceptual move duplicated by every army that ever went to war, we designate our enemies by naming them so and then ranting about their offenses. A weed is simply a plant in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a weed is a weed especially if it is likely to spawn reinforcements. Armed with such rationalizations, which have served us for millennia, we tear up the most opportunistic foliage and insist on cultivating that which has to be mollycoddled and defended against invasive species.