Snowmageddon

The storm has been dubbed Snowmageddon, for threatening multiple feet and its windy, blizzardy nature. But no worries. Snowmageddon all you want! There's chicken stew already made, sitting in the fridge. The diabetes supplies are all stocked up, and I even fought my way through the grocery store yesterday for some and delicious Florida strawberries (but actually to pick up some washing machine soap). Matt's home, too -- yay!! He picked up some red wine just before the heavy snow started falling. The neighbors are already checking in for play dates & get togethers. Life is good.

The powers that be let us off at noon today, but there were so few kids in the class that it was an easy day. Maybe we'll even be off on Monday, my busy day, for a complete bonus.

In Maryland we don't get the February break that school systems in New England get, and it always seems like a looooooong stretch from winter break to spring. Hard to stay focused, short days making for short tempers, and it feels like the school year has gone on for 10 months already. As my friend Leah says, every February she says she's quitting. (I'm sure the students have the same sentiment!)

But this year mother nature has given us a reprieve. Break out the board games and pour the cocoa (or the wine). Thank you, snow. I really needed you.

A few lines from Billy Collins' "Shoveling Snow with Buddha"

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

Routine

Sometimes it is hard to come to the computer to write because I don't have anything to say that is IMPORTANT. After all, I'm committing words to paper (screen) for all time and for many eyes, so shouldn't it be IMPORTANT?

But the last few days have been routine. And ROUTINE is not so bad. We had a birthday in the house, yes, and that was and was not out of the ordinary. A full house, a large family -- birthdays are comfortable & familiar, if not routine. I think there's something good to be said for the morning alarm, the balletic timing of school-morning breakfasts, the snippets of NPR on the way to work. Something wonderful and rejuvenating about autumn with its class schedules and coffee breaks.

Maybe ROUTINE has been good because Daniel's sugars have been mostly in range this week (except for the "save-all-my-carbs-for-birthday-ice cream" mistake). ROUTINE has Dominic learning new teachers, new subjects, new routines in grade 1 that exhaust him in ways that a day at the pool can't. ROUTINE even makes middle school bearable for Nora (but there are always jerks in middle school so I'm keeping my fingers crossed).

The routine turning of the year seems to have clicked over one notch away from summer and towards fall, and even the sky was celebrating the sudden change in the air with a riotous, colorful party for sunset. I went outside to pick a few late-summer peppers and tomatoes, and stopped to breathe it all in; the quiet moment in the neighborhood, the changing angles of light. Then the geese were overhead, announcing their southward flight path, calling for attention.

Mary Oliver is probably my favorite poet, she has a way of turning the ordinary into the magical. I have been thinking tonight about her poem, Wild Geese. It goes:

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

That's from her book Dream Work. And tonight, in a routine moment, I fell into a brief state of grace & beauty. Thanks in great part to Mary Oliver, to the raw poetry in the sound of geese, and to a much needed change of season.