School mode note to self

School started a few days ago and I wonder again, what have I gotten myself in for?

Enormous reading loads from books with names like Herodotus, A History of Knowledge, Greek Lives and Reformed Dogmatics. Multiple assignments weekly. Teachers who specify things like "don't be shallow," "I expect you to contribute; if you're shy, get over it" and "you are responsible to know everything I say in this class." Presentations 10 minutes long, 5 minutes of questioning following. Choir sessions where the right notes won't come out no matter what. Sometimes I think my head can't possibly get around half of what is expected, and I want to be completely immature and complain about these tasks; after all, there are so many things I would rather be doing than memorizing dates and practicing geometry and finding out how to put latin words into perfect passive conjunctive! Yup.

So. Why am I doing all this?

Because when I'm not groveling in my self-pitying mode, I know how much of a gift all this is. I remember that knowledge is worth the effort it takes to pursue it. I see the goals, quavering off somewhere in the future, that I am working for... I want to be able to give to someone else, all my life, and this is all in preparation for that. Because so many people have sacrificed and are sacrificing for me to learn what I am studying now.

Forget the headaches and the tears as I frustrate over assigned reading and supplemental reading and online reading and handouts and the school handbook, and hands and eyes sore from taking notes in class and penciling notes in books and typing on the computer, correcting and re-typing. Forget the less-than-satisfactory grades scrawled across the difficult test. Remember mornings in class with 40 friends with fresh notebooks and open books discussing what they have learned and expect to be asked about. Remember standing to sing or pray with the professor and the voices that have learned to harmonize. Remember the excitement of that professor as he gives to you what he so clearly loves. Remember the long-worked for nod of approval and brief "Well done" at recitation. Remember being asked to Sunday dinner, laughter at freshman creative sketches, and going to ice cream to celebrate the final math exam being over.

Whether I am able to complete my tasks perfectly, we shall see. My skeptic little brain doubts it. What is left for me is to give faithfully to this vocation. Con-fidence.

creative sketch

The Power Line

It carries electricity across my grandpa’s property. In a wide swath it goes through cedars and firs and hemlock, dipping and rising over hills, a row of silver skeletons heading toward the Canadian border. The legs are braced with dozens of steel shafts, and the short, bent arms hold up the wires.

The wires perpetually hum, carrying voices and lights north and south, connecting the far parts of the earth. Hidden in long, twisted cables that drag low the lines between the great structures, the weight of that power pulls at the insulators. And it pulls us closer.

We grab the flat metal framework, warm from sunlight, and pull ourselves up on the lowest crossbars. The leaning legs are tall, and the supports aren’t close enough together to monkey-bar up; the heads of the bolts stick out on this side, but their knobs are too far apart for footholds. I stare up at mathematical shafts intersecting between me and the sun, T-ing and X-ing steadily upward. Bracing feet and arms against opposite angles, we inch slowly higher, the narrow shanks hard against back or shoulder or palm the only forces we can feel. The air seems still, but between the bars of this tower I can see trees moving at the edge of the woods.

One arm caught fast around the upright at my left, I hang powerless. I am on a web turned steel, perfect and grey, planned and purposeful, catching the light across this corner of Grandpa’s land.

I wrote this in Rhetoric class a few months ago.

somesing

After Weeding

I like to come to the end of a row

having released hundreds of plants

from the choking crowd of weeds,

to see them stand in their straggly line

feeling the sun’s full heat again;

to stretch my cramped limbs,

slap the loose soil from my dirty trousers,

and wipe the warm sweat from my neck and forehead

leaving a wide smear on my sleeve.

I like to drain the last drops of lukewarm water

from a wide-mouthed mason jar,

then pick my barefoot way to the rows of raspberries,

to find the first strong red among the dark green leaves,

to lift each drooping, un-pruned stalk

in search of more,

and smash with my tongue their slow sweetness.

I like to slip them from their pale, hard stems

into a cupped palm,

then roll them into the water jar

until it’s crammed full of moist color,

thinking of shortcake and cool whipped cream;

to twist the sandy lid back on,

collect my shoes at the garden gate,

and walk back slowly toward the house,

holding the jar by the ridged gold top

and swinging the sun-warmed shoes by the strings,

with the tops of the socks wilting over the sides.

Something I Used to Do

I found this while poking around the computer at home, written a couple years ago. This was one of our favorite pasttimes and my little sisters and brothers still do similar things on the hillside above our house. Only now, Daddy's job is road work and bulldozing, and some of the boys are regular employees lately, so they aren't a part of helping out in the 'truck pile' with the kids.

Playing Trucks

Summer days when Daddy had no work, he came out to the truck pile with us. We had an almost unbounded sandbox, the hillside by our house being pure, finer-than-seashore sand, fair as our blond heads. There we spent hours, creating castles shaped by plastic cups and careful hands, digging mines and tunnels into the steep sand bank, houses like ancient indians. We built ponds and moats for our castles, which we filled carrying coffee cans of water from the leaky red faucet. We shaped tiny footpaths, gardens and forests, gathering gravel, moss and tiny evergreens to landscape our kingdoms, grass for the roofs of houses, strait sticks for flagpoles. Using Tonka trucks, we carved turn-arounds, driveways, highways. Daddy engineered, and taught us how to run the dump truck, grader and loader, how to slant the corners, shape the shoulders, and make gradual grades on our hills. When we were satisfied with our world, we called Mom out and she toured our properties.

a kind of love poem

07/14/07
The Couple

There is a long canoe
on the wide sweep of the lake,
deep red on deep blue.

The woman leans laughing toward
the man, bending gently to his oars.

With the sun dazzling their eyes
they know they’ll be gliding on this lake
the rest of their lives.

Little corners like this

I love this poem- especially the 3rd stanza.

Any Morning
William Stafford

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.