I wandered in orange…radiating in the warmth of kinship, rebellious as la Principaute d’ Orange…warmed at the edge of apricot fires and heartened by summer orange ladybugs. And yet…there remained a mellowed and amber discontent.

Enter you…butterscotch surprise! Warming, cheering, energizing with tangerine flames and the promise of peach blossoms which have yet to blossom and bloom.

No love is so orange that it does not lean toward trade…seeking to replace the old with the new…pining to stem the flow of active plenty for a deeper golden hued sunshine and contentment…trading up to live with one who also seeks the orange life.

Together we feast at that mango table…joy and plenty, the red brought nearer to humanity by its yellow…the full fiesta plate.

One small student begins school but hardly ever attends…here’s what happens: Official district letters are mailed and more attendance letters follow. Phone calls are made. Family members are contacted and new and/or alternating busing arrangements established. The result: more days are missed, more emails are sent and social workers are sent to the home. The child returns sporadically, then quits coming again.

Calling cards are dropped off at the house and then addresses change. Phone numbers change. Contact is lost. This small student is in and out; in and out. New busing is arranged. The system bends over backwards and stands on its head, all for naught. A milestone is reached; 50 days absent.

The crowd of adults trying to cajole just one family to send their child to school grows weary and tired of it all. Resolve is broken. Then the district head of attendance is contacted. Child Protective Services is reached; a report is filed. The big guns attempt to shake something out. Days go by. 60 days absent. No case worker contact; then 63 days absent and counting. To anyone working outside the confines of our district, be assured this scenario is real and shockingly common.

The veneer of organization and efficiency needs to be peeled away…and something else needs to be done. Find a way…some way to enforce attendance…immediately. 63 long days…

Day 66…absent. No information on the recent district attendance blitz. A blitz? We need a major change; maybe something besides using slightly antiquated terminology.

It needs to be impossible for any one child to miss so much school.

Day 67…no student. It is a circular firing squad…which office/person didn’t call/document/respond/pursue…and how shall we fix not calling/documenting/responding/pursuing…what next?

Day 68…no student. Enforce attendance! It’s a challenge; apparently an insurmountable one. School attendance is something we as a nation, our culture agreed upon…years ago.

Day 69…no student. I wonder how many people who work outside our schools have any idea about our absenteeism problem?

Day 70…big unwieldy systems do not work well. It is too easy to hide behind phone trees, voice-mails, protocol, social niceties and the hope that ‘someday, someone will probably do something’…

Day 72…if any other attendance official from Central Office wishes to grace our presence and lecture us about attendance, I would suggest that they don’t. Find my/our student…then we’ll talk.

Four years later…an update…I had hoped for change. However, one of my students missed 133 days of school this year. I do not know what happened to my missing student from four years ago, other than that the family moved to Queens, NY.

Time laughed in my face, and I laughed back…heartily laughed, uproariously doubled over with chuckles…for the school year has ended…the tail lights fading in the distance. We have rolled smoothly right around the tracks to the first Monday of the rest of our lives and the rich smell of rain before it swoops down and the startling clap of thunder and the grey green clouds.

And now…the path is the loneliest road…unstructured creativity and the intentions of a thousands hours. Let it rain…let it pour…over thirsty roads…filling up all the deadened gullies…for I am dust covered in standards and stagnation…the demise of ideas and the burdensome weight of a tumble bug, a rock-o-plane and a shoot the chute of the public school system.

Let it rain, let it rain…come cover me wetly.

Somewhere…somehow, it was time to return to food roots; to the heritage. There was a season for fruits and vegetables…the random Indian meal…the nod to Korea or the wink at Turkey and the organic movement and the war against plastic food containers and the dilemma of bottled water versus tap. All very tiresome in the end; back to beginnings.

Why crave potatoes or bread and butter at 11 in the evening and not pineapple? Why sod and not sand? Why does the smell of lush marinating pot roast call one back to the table, to the Sunday meals in the Dakotas; the oily cinnamon sun buckle and the orange chocolate doughnut…the boiled coffee with the tinny aftertaste of cooking metal? There is something latent in these smells…some seething memory waiting to birthe…the forgotten peasant, the sorrowing immigrant, the boy with no shoes and the saving of bits and pieces of thread; the sweat, the pain and the simplicity.

It all comes out in the food. Every smell is a link to more than a hundred years gone by. Eat a potato, redeem the memory. Drink black boiled coffee, receive the courage to continue. Buttered toast cures illness and apathy.

Bid farewell to affluence for the moment; this space we live in now with time to kill in leisure until there is no more time to fill. Remember the days of small education and endless work, the careful, prayerful saving of paper, of threads, of food. If they can’t be remembered, then pick up your shovel and dig. And if digging fails, then eat a potato late at night, save a paper bag and consider these things…

The pumpkin patch is planted. The tomato plants are planted; garden commencement. We christened the patch ‘Patty’ and the edgings of tomato plants ‘Tommy’. I preferred ‘Tuppence’ but they are after all, beefsteak tomatoes and the name rang false.

I assume the fox, who runs scattershot on the rim of this neighborhood, will leave our labor unscathed. In recent weeks, a rabid cousin of our community’s artful-dodger, while running wild and crazed around one of the nearby streets in Brighton, managed to bite and sufficiently terrify six individuals, including a friend of mine. I am therefore, watchful. My friend, after having been badly bitten, fought off the fox with a metal hanging flower basket rod and with assistance from a kind neighbor who walloped the animal with a large rock; subsequently, everyone ran for his and her lives. The nearby woodlands are filled with our own fox’s food and I have observed nothing out of the ordinary.

I have promised pumpkins to the four year old twins next door who watched the planting with great earnest, calling out ‘Hello! Hello!’ until they were sufficiently acknowledged.

It rained today; a damp, off the lake soaking which saved us watering time. Nothing left for this evening but the wind chimes, the faded chatter of children giving up the street to go home and the imagined tread of the fox; watching from the edge of the woods…

Evening rolls out over the street edges…’Angelina, Angelina!’ A young voice answers. ‘She’s inside!’ Raucous laughter. A door slams. Then a lone figure bounces a basketball. Once. Twice. Once more. Silence. Whoever is yelling disappears up the other end of the street. A distant rallying hoot…fades out. The day’s energy is spent.

A chirping bird, a bit late to the night descending, twirtles and flibbits; there’s a rustling in the thick green branches. Silence.

Is this a memory of something I have? Or is it something I have lost? Is that the walking man, walking on by or is it the terrible dream in the night? I call out to him from the edge of our porch. ‘Are you seeing any art exhibits this summer?’ He responds, ‘No, no…I’m in the mountains all summer this time’. I nod. ‘All right then, understandable of course’. He disappears.

Time to go inside now. I hear distant bike bells. The small twins with matching helmets and bikes still dragging with training wheels ride slowly by the front of the house. They are still careful with the steering because twilight is tricky that way. Their father follows behind with a dilapidated dog; too much thick white fur for summer humidity. A duo of yippy dogs growl passionately as the big one limps past on his leash. He could not be less concerned with their yappy antics.

A single car floats by. The mosquitoes are out now; having reconvened during the day, they are beginning to attack with vengeance. The voices are gone.

Is it a memory or something I have lost? I roll up the porch screen and go in the house.

I dreamt last night…in the month of June. You came into the room, wearing your purple checked shirt…all bent over and smiling and pleasant. We chatted and went somewhere and you adjusted your glasses as you always do.

I feel the fabric of that purple checked shirt, the buttons and the fold in the collar.

I heard that death is a terrible thing and that no one should wander through it. But of course…of course…and therein lies the tension. We were not to have had the experience and here we find ourselves in the greening month of June; with the evening air which smells like old wine, touching the checked material of purple cotton and hearing the honking of a lone and lost goose outside the window…

June is not busting out all over. There is not enough crisp in the air to fry a potato; forget sunshine and blossoms and buds. June is bleeding out in a million gallons of beautiful silver slate sheets of endless rain.

Soggy, groggy, foggy, boggy…the emergency flood watch is sounding and it’s raining again and the lake is rising while June is leaking out all over…

A sleepy morning in a Connecticut suburb…the strong smell of coffee permeates…rising up along the wooden staircase, through the door, under the blankets. Far, far in the distance…almost as in a dream, a low drifting apparition…lies the steady quiet rumbling stream of heavy traffic heading into the city, the Big Apple beckoning those still working on this Juneteenth. The sound of moving wind, steady, forward frolling, quiet. Not tight enough to hear the grinding gears…not wide enough to sound like the ocean…just the forever grey twisting traffic ribbon heading down into the canyons.

A rooster crows.

I sit up in the bed. Silence. There it is again. Did I actually just hear a rooster? A rooster in paradise, far from the maddening crowd. It is incongruous. Perhaps a rooster in hand is worth two in the city which never sleeps.

Later, after coffee I enquire. ‘It isn’t actually allowed’ a family member answers and shrugs indifferent shoulders.

I love this. A rooster in Connecticut. Somewhere, in a lonely meadow lying fallow between New York and Connecticut lines, a scrappy rooster, maybe a Rhode Island Red or a Sussex was snatched and brought to the suburbs to soften the manic stream of sprawl and urban clutter. So now he’s here, crawking and muttering and letting go with abandon that high pitched wail…and we all hear and marvel…

I remember riding in the car with my father; no seat belts, open windows, breathing in corn dust from the greening fields. His left arm is bare and resting on the heated edge of the window; his right hand steers casually, thumb hooked over the bottom of the wheel; streets and ruts.

Alone on Route 19, driving past the huge field of sunflowers in the forever sunshine, our destination is the old building on Main Street in Fillmore. As we enter the grey, sagging structure I still feel the splintered wooden flooring under my bare feet. It is a simpler time.

The ancient man managing the store and shuffling behind the counter, quietly makes our treats; forever faceless. I am too young to pay much attention to his ancient eyes.

Dad orders a chocolate coke and I work on a root beer float. He sips carefully, favoring upper gums stitched recently by a dentist. I wrap bare legs around the squeaky iron stool pole and balance carefully on the round seat. The store is silent. We are the only customers in here.

The building is dying. Even I know it as a four year old because the wood smells so, so old. I pay attention to the wood and miss the lines on the man’s silent face. The boards splinter my feet as we leave. The floor is cracking and sagging. I should wear sandals next time.

We ride silently back to Houghton, full of sugar and I hold my arm out the window, fighting the air and letting my hair whip wildly. My feet are filthy and I crawl over the hot seat into the back, lying on the floor, listening to the hum of the heated wheels on the tar.

It is a simpler time…