MindSpinner

Today the owner of a local furniture and appliance store came to replace the baking element in the oven. Dark-haired daughter swears we should have replaced the dryer first. Jeans shrunk skin tight in the dryer are apparently more important than food to a sixteen year old. On the other hand, she who pays the bills counters that clothes get dry with or without a dryer, while baking without an oven remains a hit-or-miss affair dependent on sunny midday hours. Moreover, one cannot fit a pizza, a blueberry pie, or a full-size sheet of chocolate chip cookies in a Sun Oven. Also relevant is the fact that one oven heating element costs much less than an entire dryer, though more than one would like to pay - $120, to be exact. She who pays the bills also notes that dark-haired daughter has not suggested that she and her friends should forego the mewithoutYou concert in order to divert money to a dryer fund. Nobody is suggesting that. We have our priorities.

Today, then, is officially declared to be Oven Day, and we are celebrating by baking brownies. You just can’t accomplish that with a dryer .

This spring I watched the roses calculate, after killing frost, answering branch by branch the question, “How far back must I die in order to live?” The dying back seemed to consolidate life by means of retreat to some point from which return would be possible. Sometimes six inches was enough - just the tender new growth that dried to rustling papery skirts drooping from every branch. Sometimes one fork lived and another died. Two roses, the hybrid teas, died back all the way to the ground.

I waited a long time to trim the dead branches from the living. For a long time, I thought there would be nothing.

The Memorial Day Rose sprouted from its forked base in late April and lifts three blooms today on stems a third last year’s height. Rose Lasting Love looked for months to be no more than a thorny gray ladder for a clematis to climb, the one with purple blooms like tall fairy hats. The clematis looked so forlorn and lost I twined it on a trellis. Only yesterday I saw among the tangle of its vines new rose leaves, green tinged with burgundy. Frost had not killed the root of the rose: later this summer there will be blooms.

It’s a done deal. Tickets are on the way. A room has been reserved at a Holiday Inn in Indianapolis. Dark-haired daughter, two of her friends and I are headed to a mewithoutYou concert on the 27th. Now I will get to hear in person the people who sing the songs that are constantly playing on the car CD player, courtesy of my offspring, who are appalled to discover that I now know all the lyrics and can sing along.

Mom singing lyrics can make songs decidedly less cool. Do you suppose resident mewithoutYou fans know that lead singer Aaron Weiss and guitarist Mike Weiss are both English majors licensed to teach that subject in the state of Pennsylvania? Perhaps not.

Of all the mewithoutYou songs we listen to while driving from here to there, the one that sticks in my head is this one. I like it, except for the ending, for the images and the lilt of the words and music.

In a sweater poorly knit, and an unsuspecting smile
Little Moses drifts downstream in the Nile
A fumbling reply — an awkward, rigid laugh
I’m carried helpless by my floating basket raft

Your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between,
sweeter than any wine, and bitter as mustard greens
Light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickle bread
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

As you plow some other field, try and forget my name,
see what harvest yields, and, supposing I’d do the same
I planted rows of peas, but by the first week of july –
they should have come up to my knees but they were maybe ankle high

Take the fingers from your flute to weave your colored yarns,
and boil down your fruit to preserves in mason jars
But now the books are overdue and the goats are underfed…
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

You’re a door-without-a-key, a field-without-a-fence
You made a holy fool of me, and I’ve thanked you ever since
If she comes circling back, we’ll end where we’d begun
Like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one

Or if I’m a crown without a king, if I’m a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

I
do
not
exist
only
you
exist

The marathon is winding down: graduation was last night. In a couple of hours, another teacher and I go to return borrowed flowers to a local nursery. One more set of exams must be graded, and I’ll be roping in a few students who need to return to school to complete required work before they can receive credit for English 10. (It isn’t over on the last day of school; it’s over when students successfully complete a course.)

Twenty-nine seniors graduated last night, not hundreds. A number of them had attended school in the same building together since kindergarten. Their fourth grade teacher and their preschool teacher as well as their high school teachers were there to hug them goodbye and wish them well. In how many places does that still happen?

Miracle Girl was quite well enough to board a dinner cruise yacht for prom two weeks ago, to dance with her long-time beau, and to walk across the stage to receive her diploma and awards. She speaks softly and somewhat slowly, but she’s gradually recovering her short-term memory, and she’s able to share her thoughts herself now on the blog her family began to update everyone about her condition. She’s just beautiful, and the determination that served her so well before her accident continues to ensure that she will defy odds and continue all her life to inspire us all.

No one enjoyed graduation more than Exchange Student, a young woman who came to us last fall from Denmark with an endearing accent and smile as natural as sunshine and daisies. She’s determined to import pep rallies, proms, awards for academic achievement, and graduation rituals complete with caps, gowns, and honor cords back into her own country. Her effervescent joy after the ceremony was more than payment enough for all the behind-the-scenes work that a graduation entails. She says that now her little sister wants to come to us when she’s a senior, “So you will have another me. She is just like me, only she is skinny.”

The Class of 2007 is really 30 and not just 29, but one sat apart in the stands. Personal circumstances sidelined him last fall first as a homebound student and then a home school student finishing his graduation requirements online. He’ll be done early next week, having learned difficult lessons about the potential price of procrastination, and his diploma is waiting for him, already signed. He came to see his fellows graduate last night and to applaud them, despite the sharp disappointment of not being able to walk across the stage in his blue cap and gown.

The community where I teach is a village that raises its children. Sometimes, when a family falls down at that job, the school is the family that makes all the difference. That doesn’t always work, of course - a student has to be receptive. But we work to make it true. Teachers watch these young people grow up over years (though I’ve been here only two), and sometimes we even watch them grow up in a day.