Today a List of Stories

The alarm

Tea - don’t forget to get the tea going before you get in the shower

Find something clean in the dryer

Start the shower

Wake the kiddos

A little light, a little kiss

Same for hubby

Water’s hot

brush teeth

“Are you ready? Are you out of bed? We have ten minutes!”

The tea, remember the tea

Drive teen daughter to high school

She talks about the story of Moses and

Slavery in the antebellum south

I think how everything, everything I know 

is knit into my memory as a story

At work I tell stories

About people who spoke Latin

About the invention of Algebra

I listen to stories

About why he wonders about stars

About how Tock, the new puppy, came home

About her love of bees and magic

We work on telling together

on how to say Eyjafjallajökull

and other fancy words

Drive home

Listen to stories about budgets and cardinals

both sequestered on the same day

In the grocery store we tell knock knock jokes

Buy a dizzy chicken - spinning while it cooks

Stories round the table

Stories before bed

Write a story for Slice of Life

Set the alarm

Bed and I tell myself the surreal stories of dreams.

Today I am a Small Creature

This evening I was looking at the photo of Saturn hanging above my son's desk as he did his homework.  You can see our home if you look carefully.  Earth is a small blue dot, second ring in from the outside, in the upper left of the photo.

Today I am a small creature 

wandering in wonder

on the thin crust

a mere mote of dust

brushed by a wisp of air,

a creature teacher

wanting wonder to awake

waiting in the wake of time

to see if what I though was fine

will root and grow.

What arrows are there

that I can throw ahead

to say when I am dead

such a one was here?

None I fear

when I turn and see what was cast

I throw my present like water

on fires of long past,

only an echo 

of one mother, no other

two hundred thousand

years ago.

Her faint call

encodes the thread

the weft that powers the web

echoes off each cell wall.

Will her long line

throw forward in space

find out new place

be unbroken by time?

Metamorphosis

I’m writing screenplay number two in a trilogy of stories about an epic mythic world. I sketched out the major plot points in an outline and read it to my children for a bedtime story.

“So,” I said when I had finished, “what did you think?”

“Sea monsters can’t breath fire,” piped up the youngest, “What use would that be to them in the water?”

“Maybe when the sea monster hits land it can grow legs - then it could breath fire.” offered my middle daughter.

“Yeah!” said middle son, “and then when it is drowned in the flood at the end of the big battle, you could see it crawl out and become a chrysalis! Then it could show up later in the story...with WINGS!!”

“Oooo!” I replied, “a dragon with a metamorphic life cycle. I like it!”

“I think you need some more about the kid as he grows up,” added my eldest daughter, “He’s just kind of a baby and then the next thing you know he’s eleven and everything about him is surprising.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, looking around at my fast growing crew, “That is how it is all right.”

“So maybe at a couple scenes so we get to know him,” she finished helpfully.

There will have to be an authors note at the end that the story was co-written by all the Peterson children!

First Day Spring Break

First day and the week spreads out before us full of potential.  What a wonderful moment. The sun is warm, there is no rush. Everyone stays in pajamas. I don’t have to push anyone to do anything, anything at all. I go to a “spin class” - a class where we all ride stationary bikes to music and the encouragements of the trainer. Sounds a bit odd, but really quite challenging. I come home for breakfast and everyone is still happily lounging about in pjs. I go to the first session of the advanced screen writing class (ooo! advanced!) and come home for lunch. The girls have eaten, put on swimsuits. They ride off on their bikes to the pool. The boys are building master pieces of lego. The husband wants to browse around CostCo (he loves CostCo). Ahh... first day of spring break.  Everyone is happy.  I sit down to uninterrupted writing time...Lovely!

Youngest Son Guest Post: The Eight Diamond Lords

The evening began with my youngest son looking up at me, a sheaf of Colorado's ‘fill in the bubble’ practice writing tests spilling out of his backpack.

“Mom,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks, “my writing doesn’t have any flow. I feel like tearing up everything!”

So he dictated a story while I typed and then we edited together for flow. Here is the result with the editing below:

            The Eight Diamond Lords


There were people falling from the clouds. The sons of the gods landed in the desert in a western town. The eight lords, each wearing their own color, were hungry so all decided to go to a bar, buy some drinks, and play cards. Then some cowboys came up to them and said “Get out of this bar. You’re not welcome here.” All the lords got in a huge argument and then got in a fight with the cowboys. The gold lord, punched the leader of the cowboys in the face and he went flying back and smashed through the wall. The lords decided to leave the town. While traveling they found awesome looking diamonds. Each of them picked one up. Oh, and did I mention that you can’t see their faces?  The diamonds started glowing the colors of the capes and hoods the lords were wearing. And then a beam from the clouds came down that matched the colors the eight masters were wearing. The beam took them back to their home.

Here is our editing: 


We made one word illegal: “they” (we decided we could keep only one “they”). He  crossed out some words and added new ones in blue. He read bits aloud as he made his decisions. Doing this on the computer seemed to add a bit of high tech fun.

There were people falling from the clouds.

They The sons of the gods landed in the desert in a western town.

They The eight lords, each wearing their own color, were hungry so they all decided to go to a bar, buy some drinks, and play cards. Then a some cowboys came up to them and said

“Get out of this bar. You’re not welcome here.”

And so they all the lords got in this a huge argument and then they got in a fight with the cowboys.

The gold one lord, he punched him the leader of the cowboys in the face and he went flying back and smashed through the wall. And then they the lords decided to leave the town. While And then they were traveling and they found these odd awesome looking diamonds. And each of them picked one up. Oh and did I mention that you can’t see their faces, the people, you can’t see their faces. And so each one picked one up. No - uh mom, I already said that. Mom! I don’t want that in my story.
“Is she writing down what I’m saying?” says big brother.

And the diamonds started glowing what the colors of the capes and hoods they the lords were wearing. And then this a beam from the clouds came down and the beam was that matched the colors what they the eight masters were wearing. and they got The beamed took them back to their home.

In a Chill Morning

Ever have you ever

In a chill morning

Early on the spring

Meant to go swimming 

But the warm bed held you

Just long enough 

So that after the alarm

You fell into a dream of water

stretching in every direction

breathing soft as a mermaid

wondering through caves 

of sun filtered coral and pearl?

Ever have you ever

Turned around slowly
Beneath the hot shower

In the grip of luxury

Even after you are clean

Putting off the stepping 

Out in a chill morning

Soaking in the heat

till you’d used up

all the hot water

then jumped out into a towel

and thought

tomorrow

I’ll go swimming 

tomorrow?

One Little Word 2012: WONDER

I finally chose one little word for 2012.  I first heard about it on a morning radio show - the idea of choosing a word to frame the coming year. It is a word to think about, to ruminate on throughout the year. It is also a web community. I don’t yet know how to embed links into a post, but you can find it by googleing “One Little Word” and it is hosted by Ali Edwards. I watched as many friends and    fellow bloggers chose wonderful words to think about this year. Linda at “Teacher Dance” chose the word ‘comfort’ and has written about it several times.  I just couldn’t find one, till today one word kind of found me.  A word popped into my head that has already shaped the first three months of the year and I would like to hang on to it for the next few.  It is the word ‘wonder.’ I encounter an experience of wonder almost daily in my work - the amazing things I learn about and with my students.  Each member of my family fills me with wonder, with their existence and their antics, both good and odd. I watch in wonder as my children juggle and ride unicycles and I also wonder why it is so hard for them to get the bath towels off the floor and onto the towel rack. I like that the word is both a noun and a verb. So that is my revelation for the day. My word for 2012 is WONDER!

She caught her breath in amazement...

Friday was a journey through the middle ages - one of my favorite topics to work on with students. I really wish I had a time machine, but we come as close as we can. 

First stop was the Cathedral of St. John in the Wilderness in downtown Denver. It is an Episcopal church built from 1906 to 1911 in the gothic style. We sat out in the garden and looked at the outside. We talked about the fall of Rome and romanesque style arches, the rediscovery of Plato, how the parable of the cave was reinterpreted through a Christian lens and how this influenced gothic style. I asked my students to think about what daily life for a medieval peasant was like. I asked the students to pay attention to how they felt when they walked into the Cathedral and notice where there eyes looked first. It was a lot of talk. My students diligently drew little maps of the Mediterranean and took notes. 

Then we walked into the Cathedral.  

I must admit, I get such a nice feeling of satisfaction when I hear the students catch their breath in amazement.

“Up!” said one student in a hushed voice, “they want you to look up!”

“Look at all the light!” said another.

“It’s so much bigger inside!” exclaimed a third in an awed whisper.

We spread out a copy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi from the 13th century on the floor in the middle of the transept and talked about how the educated people of western Europe pictured themselves and their place in the world at that moment in time. We climbed the circular stairs in a tower to the choir loft. We looked through arrow slit windows. We talked about the vulnerabilities of castles and surviving a siege. We went to the library and held the leaves of illuminated manuscripts handwritten on vellum. We finished at the art museum looking at changes in style from the 13th to the 16th centuries. We talked about what people will think of us seven centuries from now. 

It was an amazing day. 

But it was that moment, when they caught their breath, that the experience of another time became real for my students. 

That is my favorite thing.

Book at Dawn - Perfect Moment

I got up early - determined to go swimming and get back on track after a week that knocked me flat. But I was caught by a book. It was the ending of a book actually, that had caught me earlier in the week.  “When You Journeyed Homeward” by Cynthia Kennedy, embodies the solitude of a mountain trek. It is the memoir of a young wife, caring for her husband, after he has been injured climbing Cho Oyu in Nepal. The book is filled with quiet, agonizing vulnerability as they travel along together to discover if their marriage will survive. By the end I had a new understanding of why humans would endure such pain - some to summit peaks and some to write poems. I lay in my warm bed, next to my softly snoring husband, watching the sun rise and relishing the peace of the last few pages. I’ll go swimming tomorrow.

Fox

Right out of Aesop’s Fables

A bright sleek fox 

Hopped gracefully to the top of our gate

And down into our fenced-in yard

The fox chased a rabbit

Stopped 

Contemplated the tall fence all around him

Then he lightly leapt again to the top of the gate 

Dropped down into the field and fled

Moral: What holds your prey may hold you too!

The Dark Just Before the Dawn, on a Bike

My youngest child just learned to ride a bike today. We worked for about 20 minutes and he was ready to quit. This is my fourth time through this. I knew we were close. 

“Here,” I said, “Let’s just ride back to the gate and we’ll take a brake.”

“Mom, I want to walk.”

“Come on, one more time.”

“Mom! Why can’t I just walk!”

He started to walk, hands on the handle bars. I held the back of the seat. The bike didn’t budge.

“Mom!”

He heaved a huge, exasperated sigh.

“Just to the gate.”

“I’ll make you a strawberry smoothie when we get inside.”

Another exasperated sigh.

He got on the bike. I ran along side, holding the back of the seat - faster, faster...I let go of the seat and stood still. He got to the gate and jumped away from the bike as it stopped and fell.  He looked around for me and saw where I was. His eyes grew wide.

“Did I do that !?!”

“Yup.”

He could barely contain himself.

“I still want a break and a strawberry smoothie.”

“O.K.”

“But then can we come out and ride some more?”

Farting Birth Stories

I’m so lucky! We have a professional day today. So over this weekend another teacher has graciously let me cut in line and check out “Wonder.” I started reading it aloud to my boys, 8 and 10, last night. We made it as far as August’s birth story. The author is brilliant. The birth story is full of farts.

My boys were rolling on the ground, laughing, tears streaming from their eyes. Many fart noises were made in armpits. Then:

“Mommy, did your nurse fart when I was born?” said the 10 yr old.

“I don’t remember.”

“I was born in the kitchen, right?”

“Yes, we had rented a hot tub and put it in the kitchen. But I was uncomfortable. The sides of the tub were soft and I couldn’t brace myself against it to push you out. So Mary Ellen, the midwife, helped me get out. Then I sat down by the wood stove and I told Mary Ellen ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore.’ and she said ‘Oh yes you can!’ and out you came!”

“Then what did Daddy do?”

“Well, Daddy sat on the couch holding you while I got cleaned up. He kept saying - 

‘You are so born! Yes born is what your are! You are so born...so born!’

“What about me?” asks the 8 yr old

“We were in a hospital...”

“But it was one with a hot tub, it had a hot tub.”

“Yes I stayed in the hot tub. Your sister was holding my hand and telling me to push and then you kind of swam up.”

10 yr old chimes in “You  must have thought ‘nice of them to build an addition! It was getting kind of cramped in there!’

Both boys start laughing again. 10 yr old snorts.

“Yes,” I say, “but then you hit the air and you were not happy!”

8 yr old does his best impression of an unhappy newborn. He’s pretty good!

I marvel again at the power of stories and the magic of writing. We can look at a piece of paper and hear the voice of another separated from us in space and time. Amazing!

Today, on our professional day, we field trip teachers are taking a group of core teachers on a field trip to the main branch of the Denver Public Library. Special collections, amazing new resources in the building and on the internet, and stories, stories, stories! Who wouldn’t want to go?

True Love: Three Mundane Examples

1. I come home from work on Friday. Three of our four children are ill. House is  a disaster area. I begin to restore a bit of order. I set the table, light some candles and wonder what to make for dinner. Husband and healthy son come in the door with dinner in hand. Surprise!
2. Socks have been washed but not sorted for a week. That’s six people, so let’s see...12 socks a day, 8 or so days plus all the socks that could not find their mates from last week...mixed piles of socks blanket the living room floor. Four children watch a music video on the internet where socks are animated as fish. Suddenly the adult socks and the children’s socks begin swimming to different island pillows on the floor.  The teen socks swim up the stairs to the girls room.  The boys finish the game by loading their sock island into a blanket spaceship and blasting off to explore the closet planet in their room.
3. 3 a. m. Healthy son is barfing all over the rug as he runs to the bathroom down the hall. I clean him up and fix up a bed in our room. Poor kiddo. As I go down to the kitchen to make him some ice chips I hear my sweet husband cleaning the carpet with the wet-vac.

I am so blessed.

Who am I, how did I get here and what do I do?

I am a teacher at an independent school where the students pick a topic they are passionate about to study in depth.  I teach math and Latin but mostly I take students on field trips related to the topics they choose to study.

One of the most exciting times of the year is when we field trip teachers get the lists of the topics the students have chosen. It’s like Christmas! The lists have been coming in during the last few days. I’m working on many of the topics that relate to anthropology and one of the students I get to work with wants to know how we got here. He’s not asking about the origin of humans, but once there were humans how did they spread out over the planet.

I started my search for the perfect person to help him with his questions.  I started reading about anthropologists who use genetic markers - small mutations that occurred at various points in human history and were then passed on - to build up a map of early human migration.  

The weight of human history haunted the rest of my day - as I listened to news from Syria, as my husband told a family story at the dinner table, as I glanced at family photos from 1900 on the wall going up the stairs, as I read my children a bedtime story about Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. And I thought - when my ancestors were on the verge of extinction and each day was an infinitesimally epic quest to survive, all I do and know was far and away, in a future where each minute is filled with unimaginable, unbelievable wonders. 

Refining Snow

It snowed a few weeks ago on the way to work and I wanted to write about it but have not had time till now.  Thank goodness the daily slice is back!! 

It was snowing, just sputtering flurries as I left home. By the time I was well tucked into the highway crawl, it fluttered down in buckets.  Clouds scooted so low I could have reached out my window and scooped in handfuls of ragged fluff. We crept along and then stopped completely.  Not to worry. I could see the exit to my super secret shortcut just a few yards ahead.

The shortcut wound its way along service roads. Huge tanker trucks eased their way gingerly onto the white road. Up ahead  was the turn that would bump me over the tracks and through the oil refinery, a bit smelly, but quicker than sitting in traffic. 

I made the turn and entered a wonderland.  Tall silver towers, each encased in a lattice of ladders loomed and vanished in the clouds. Every tower was lined in fairy lights. Snow flakes swirled. A hawk grew out of the mist, glided just past my windshield, and disappeared into the strange forest.

The Missing Piece

I am deep cleaning my house this summer.  We moved to Colorado from Connecticut four years ago.  We packed in a hurry, scooping up whatever came to hand and filling box after box.  Although we gave away a lot of stuff I remember marveling, as I packed, at the amount of junk we still had: clothes that were no longer worn, papers that were probably not that important, a favorite puzzle with a missing piece.  We unpacked in a hurry as well, and dove into our new lives.  

New house, new job, new schools and end of life care for my parents all eclipsed house cleaning in priority.  This means that at the start of this summer the boy’s room, whose youngest occupant is now eight, still had shelves filled with the favorite toys of a four year old.   Alphabet blocks and electronic Lego kits competed for space.  The floor was ankle deep in school papers and hot wheel cars.  The boys went to camp the third week in June and I plunged in with a large shovel, determined to create order out of chaos.  I became a whirlwind of organization.  Papers were shredded and recycled, toys given to friends with younger children. After I had vacuumed I sat still and quiet on their little couch for a long time just relishing the calm and the order.   I ran my fingers absentmindedly back and forth along the edge of the clean rug when my forefinger detected one last piece of junk.  I yanked it out from under the rug with a shout of disgust and then stopped as I beheld a marvel.  I held one small jigsaw piece belonging to a detailed puzzle of the solar system.  I, of course, knew where the puzzle was now but this piece had gone missing about ten years ago, when my eldest was eight!  It had moved in the ebb and flow of small pieces of junk, from one child’s toy box to another’s drawer.  It had survived the babyhood of two inquisitive toddlers, a move halfway across the country and my recent take no prisoners vacuum job.  I don’t know if it is a metaphor for something profound or just a sign of my insanity in letting all these little drawers full of odds and ends remain in our lives.  But Oh!  What a feeling of satisfaction when I put that piece back in its puzzle.

Heat

The Walk from the Pool to the Bike

Heat

Kisses my chilled skin

Crisp with chlorine

Legs swing and melt

Into each gravel crunch

Heat

Seeps in deep

Soaks the very marrow

Breaths come so full and smooth

One more and I could fly

Heat

Slips through my hair

Flutters the skirt

Loose around my knees

Heat

Drenches slanting shadows

Lilies soused with gold

Overarch my path

Heat

Bakes into cricket’s trills

Into the Cicadian waves

That break on my ears

Like the sea

Heat

Pulls out the languid lilt

Of the sunset robin

A moon is rising

Rich as cream and

Full to bursting

P.S.

This perfect summer moment is brought to you in memory of Spalding Gray and his never-ending search for perfect moments.

Settling into Summer

            Summer has started and every year I wrestle with finding the rhythm of that particular summer.  I always have a list of millions of things I’m anxious to do; tasks, projects and even celebrations put off during the all-consuming school year.  Every year I worry whether I’ll be able to discipline myself into a workable routine and stick to it flexibly enough to have plenty of spontaneous fun but also accomplish at least some of my goals.

In the old movie “So Dear to My Heart” a boy is wondering how to find wild honey so he can sell some to the local shopkeeper.  The shopkeeper tells him “Just find a bee and follow it to its hive.”  The boy leaves and the shopkeeper’s friend chides him “You just don’t care how you waste that boy’s time.”  To which the shopkeeper replies, “What is time to a boy?”  I miss that feeling from childhood, that summer was endless and full of possibilities for quest and triumph.  But as I get older I am more and more conscious of the urgency of time pressing in on me.  The more I fret, the less gets done.  So, to the first task of the summer: Saturday I took my oldest daughter to take her SAT tests. On the drive there we saw an enormous bird fly low across the road just ahead.  It was a raptor, the largest I had ever seen flying in the wild.  It was being ‘dive-bombed’ by three or four small dark birds, but as it passed us it soared away, easily out flying its tormentors.  I thought it must be a golden eagle, but its wings were mottled with white.  I had never seen a golden eagle in flight before, just perched in captivity, where they are a smooth golden brown.  At home I looked it up in the bird book.  I think it really was a golden eagle. 

            That evening I took a bike ride to a local lake with my eleven-year-old son.  We live in such a beautiful place.  We saw avocets and egrets, white pelicans and killdeers, prairie dogs and even a beaver swimming across the far side of the lake with a branch in its mouth.  As we were standing by the lake, I looked to my left and saw a large grey brown mottled mass on the branch just next to me.  I wondered for a moment if it was an odd-looking hornets nest when it turned its head and I found myself looking into the yellow gold eyes of a great horned owl.  I quietly tapped my son on the shoulder and we both looked at the owl till it silently left the branch and glided out across the lake.  I am hopeful it will be a good summer.

Overwhelmed

Cleaning and packing, moving and shaking
I used to clean to avoid writing, but now I am writing to avoid cleaning
My parent's house grows emptier with each box

14 Cows for America

This Thursday and Friday are conferences here at our school.  The parent’s organization has set up a book fair in the lobby of the school and I got caught by a book as I walked through this morning.  It was a deceptively sweet looking picture book with a slightly kooky title: 15 Cows for America.  I walked past the table and saw that our admissions director was weeping as she read it.  So of course I picked up one of the copies.  It was a straightforward story, told in clear, simple prose.  A young Masi man returns home after studying medicine in the United States.  The events of 9/11 are in recent past and the young man tells the Masi what happened.  They are moved and make a gift to the people of the United States.  The line at the end of the book brought tears to my eyes:

“Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded.

Nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.”

-from 14 cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy and Wilson Kimeli Naiyomh

We are so connected to each other, even without the Internet, here on our violent blue jewel.