Another February lies before us, preparing to stretch and unfold gently in the night hours…

Welcome February…the shortest month, rich with reds and pinks, rose petals and white lace with strawberry dipped chocolates…midnight wine goblets in heated restaurants…murmured chatter as we glance out the frosted glass.

Knowing, feeling that despite the most bitter of March gusts around time’s corner, February is winter’s farewell tip of the hat, the ice-wink…and the grand Cupid exit…

‘What are you doing?’ I look at him. ‘I’m counting. You know I count. I do three things or five things. I get a lot of stuff done this way’. ‘3 or 5’ he responds. ‘What is that again?’ ‘I’ve explained this before’ I answer with a sigh. ‘Three things done…Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The spiritual world orders my material world. Five things…Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The secular experience helps order my spiritual, theological, material world’. He looks at me and chuckles. ‘Sometimes I believe you are nuts!’

I laugh as well. ‘Yes, I am. Determinedly so. Sign me up. Under the column labeled ‘nuts’ write my name in all caps’.

He looks out the window at the snow, the empty street, at the possibility of yet another day looming…working from home, talking in rectangles on Zoom, moving in smaller spaces and cramped quarters…’No, you’re not nuts…just creative in attempting to forge purpose, organization and meaning out of 10 months of shifting sands’.

I look down at my lap. Time to stand up…’One (I throw the blanket off my lap), two (I stand up), three’ (I switch off the reading room light). He watches me walk away. ‘Hey, how many steps into the cellar?’ he calls out. ’13’ I answer. Silence. I continue, ‘I haven’t decided what to do about the cellar. 13 is throwing me off’. Silence. ‘If you go down twice, that’s 26′ he says. ’13 groups of two…Old and New Testament’.

I think about this. ‘Now who’s nuts?’ I query. ‘But I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it’…

I first wrote this ten years ago. The status quo…remains just that…

How did we get here? My little elementary students are supposed to understand differences and similarities between fairy tales and tall tales, remember various characters and plots, master complicated vocabulary and higher level English phonics, take a multitude of assessments and be ready to learn about ancient Asian civilizations and do it in their second language. We are not yet half way through the school year.

This is the definition of insanity. It violates any reasoned approach to education. It is counter-rational to theories of multiple learning styles and intelligences. It crushes the motivation and educational enthusiasm of my students and in the end we have taught everything and nothing.

We remain a mile wide and an inch deep.

After an unsatisfactory couple of weeks in the world of fast food: poor service, incorrect orders, double charges, surly employees…I’ve concluded that Covid has left its mark. Whether or not he and I should have ventured into the world of fast food in the first place, is a post for another day. Feel free to judge.

This afternoon on our way home, after another bad experience…he reached his limit. As we sat in the drive through at the pharmacy he decided suddenly that ‘No hablo ingles’ was the way to go. He drove so I had to lean over to shout the order through the window in English. ‘No hablo ingles’ he repeated. The clerk looked thoroughly confused. I followed through with clarification and with changing our card on file at the pharmacy as required and he chirped happily and stubbornly, ‘No hablo ingles’.

The clerk looked questioningly at me and I smiled back at her and nodded and responded in English. We accomplished the process of picking up our purchase. Just before he shifted the car into drive and rolled up the window he looked one last time at the hapless employee and stated firmly, ‘No hablo ingles’.

We drove off and laughed and laughed.

Feel free to judge…

The idea that ‘all good things must come to an end’…is only partially true.

For the believer, there will come a day when ‘good things’…those which are truly good…will not end. That is our hope. That is why we can absorb death as a temporary glitch.

Death is indeed a ‘hiccup in the universe’…it is temporary for true believers.

The lonesome train signals somewhere in the night’s deepest heart, akin to a moment in Debussy’s Reverie. She silhouettes in the rocking chair while whispering down the pain of a child’s sore throat…the whistle mourns again. He’s leaving Ohio on the tracks to Chicago.

Third hour in the morning gloom, I hear the rumbling, agonizing shrieking whine of the train…somewhere in the darkest aftermath of loss.

The train runs on…but he has left the station.

All in all it was a confusing week of learning for my kids. We worked on symbols. One student thought the Statue of Liberty was God. Another thought Buffalo was the name of our country. One wanted to know why God was always on sticks (a crucifix).

We all agreed it was best to think before we spoke and that included me…

A favorite quote this month came from a little five year old in my class. ‘I don’t want no cockroaches in no houses!’

We agreed in our group that this was a good goal for the New Year.

And with a slight movement and a handshake…it finishes. Eight excellent years and in a single day, winding down to empty…with a sigh and a jangling of old, worn keys.

The grounded and settled feeling of never moving, of constantly shifting into the dust…fades, just at the moment when nesting into the very cracks of the wall begins. While believing the cornices and worn rugs belong to me…just at the edge of indecision, the air suddenly shifts and it is once again, time to move on. Always upward, always improving, always forward, always better…a quick walk through painted halls, a hand clutching gently around the splintered edges of the attic doorway…old stairs and the window looking out onto the gritty city…those impossibly high kitchen cupboard shelves.

A smudge of candle wax here, a dusty framed line of a favorite print staring out from an abandoned wall, a stenciled mantle and the stove where so many happy meals bubbled and steamed…empty, clean and bereft…alone and awaiting new tenants.

They stand, shiftlessly in the driveway as silly details are discussed…the detritus of city living. A transient American approach to residence…collecting enough stuff to be a complete nuisance, leaving enough behind to be painful, shedding just enough to be practical…done. And they do not know the life lived there…they have no understanding of those painted walls and candle gloams, the strange next door neighbor who waves only when greeted…they do not know. I do not see them as I stride by…there is no connecting point between us. I do not like what I see and I do not like what I feel.

My eight years belong to me. My heart butts up against their new adventure…they do not know and I shall not tell them. They hold the old jangling keys, but they own no entry to my heart…

Cell memory…

In January and February, during the shortened days and the exhausted living…I remember the feel, the odd combination of terror and invigoration…the desire to remain forever under thick blankets.

Standing late at night outside the heated house, wearing thick socks…observing the warm lights in the living room window. There was chili, hot buttered biscuits and apple pie waiting in the kitchen; I imagined the delectable tastes as the snow actually crackled and split with cold…when my skin roughened as breath hung frozen in air.

Watching blue snow that glittered brightly under the moon…eating scalding hot french fries with mustard as I walked home late in the evening from a basketball game…not being able to feel my finger tips while my tongue burned…