No Telling

Dirt Farming

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It’s that time of year again. I crave puttering and seedlings and faded pink canvas gloves and big straw hats. There’s nothing like the hot, green smell of tomato leaves after a storm, or the random geometry of climbing yard-long beans. I’m a Southern Grandmother and it’s my right to tend the garden.

But I don’t have one and it’s my own fault. I tried to simplify yard work by moving into a gardenless garden home where mysterious bands of young rogues sweep across the subdivision on riding mowers, slinging edgers and leaf blowers. Twice a week, the battalion tidies our postage-stamp yards. A plague of well-paid locusts. They do a good job, mind you, but a yard that can be manicured in half an hour is too small for a garden.

When I was a young mother with a strapping husband and big yard, I planted thick raised-bed gardens every summer. He fought the grass and bamboo, I nurtured seedlings, weeded, and staked. Later as a single mother, I turned to flowers and herbs. It was all I could manage in those busy years. Weekends when Em went to her father’s, I’d hit the plant stores. Putting rose bushes in the ground somehow helped the shock of childless weekends. It filled the empty places.

It occurs to me now I’ve unconsciously given myself less fertile ground to tend and maybe it’s a sign. The need to parent vegetables and blooms is still strong. But gardening is maternity and I suspect my own waning fertility has made choices without consulting me.

I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not ready.

So look out, Home Depot and Lowes. It’s Sunday and I plan to worship a little dirt. Grammy needs to plant even if it’s only a few tubs on a concrete patio.

Remembering the Women

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We have so many fallen to remember. Too many wars. We are all touched in some way by loss, and some of us are overwhelmed by the numbers. I know I am. But it is important that we remember.

Today is about finding a way to honor those memories. I didn’t and don’t personally know any of these women, but I’ll carry them with me all day and for more days than I know. I’ve read their stories now and I’ll return to them again and again because they are the little stones I’ve sewn in my pockets to keep me grounded.

Home Town Boy Wins Big. Twice!

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Bless his heart, he won! I can hear the screaming and see the fireworks from my front porch, and I suspect it’ll go on for hours. Things are hopping here in Conway for damn sure.

Here’s the thing – 38 million votes last night from Arkansas alone. Have any of you ever been through Arkansas? We might have almost that many ticks here after a warm winter, but nothing close to that many people. We don’t vote for the ERA around here or much in a presidential election, but put one fairly cute, aww shucks Baptist boy on American Idol and stand back, brothers and sisters. Stand back.

I won’t pretend I followed any of this before tonight. I was too busy trying to find parking during finals week to make his on-campus concert and, well, American Idol comes on during Deadliest Catch. Sorry Kris.

It’s possible I’m the only person in Conway who doesn’t own a t-shirt with his name across it. Wait – the second person. My daughter still harbors a grudge over his free Stoby’s cheese dip for life, so there are two of us. She’s fairly put out over this and I’m sure she’ll have plenty to say about fame and fortune and belonging to the right congregation.

Soon, all the profs at UCA will start pouring over old gradebooks to see if he was once in their classes. I couldn’t tell you on a bet right now if he was in one of mine. Nothing against Kris at all, it’s just that you could walk into any class on any day at any hour and see about three or four just like him – good boys who smile and say “yes ma’am.” I love those students, and their numbers are legion around here.

I do wish him well. I know his mama is mighty proud, because I saw her. In that red dress. Weeping. I’m also sure that for the next few weeks we’ll hear about the power of prayer. Jesus will get most of the credit for a while, but that’s fine. Jesus doesn’t have free cheese dip for life.

"What are you DOING?"

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I read an interesting piece about experiencing vs. spectating our lives. It reminded me of this irritating woman I follow on Twitter who leaves upward from 60 to 100 tweets a day. She’s a high school English teacher who does, I admit, leave a scads of good education links in some of those tweets. Every single time I check Twitter, she’s unloaded another fifteen to twenty more links, comments, insights, and hourly whatevers. Fine.

Yes, I know I don’t have to follow her. There’s this strange combination of connection (she’s a codirector of a group I’d rather not name, just like me) and fear of Bad Manners. Southern twitterers must bump into this dilemma all the time. UNfollowing someone, especially if you have a connection of any kind, feels a lot like walking off in the middle of a conversation at the grocery store. It’s rude and ungracious.

Yesterday, as the cloud of grades and final exams finally blew clear, I opened my Twitter to actually leave one. I don’t do this often enough to be remotely interesting to anyone, so if you follow me, well, it’s going to be a little dull. At any rate, I opened my account and there she was, this high school English teacher twittering away about this and that and filling up my whole page.

And then it occurred to me…this was a school day. She was at a high school somewhere up north with a rotating classroom of students every hour on the hour. I counted, and she sent over forty tweets between 8:00 and 4:00. That’s a little over five tweets an hour.

When did she teach? I’ve been a high school English teacher myself, and I know averting your eyes from the crowd at hand for more than ten seconds can be A Very Bad Idea. I also remember nonstop teaching, planning, conferences, lunch duty, and grading during those hours. I also remember the four or so hours at home each evening dedicated to most of that list. Teaching high school English is an all-consuming vocation.

At what point does she push away from the computer and teach in the moment? or at all? And why on earth do I need a running string of electronic teaching ephemera from someone who only twitters teaching?

Here’s the bottom line. Experience needs the luxury of time and reflection to fully explain its multiple layers and provide real meaning. Twittering bypasses reflection and allows us to forgo internal monologue and true understanding. It happens too instantly and is discarded too quickly. Twittering also eats up the moment; constantly narrating our lives turns us into spectators without actual experience. If we Twitter five times an hour we can’t be doing anything.

I’m going to set my Southern upbringing aside and UNfollow this poor woman. My guess is she’s tied up in a broom closet right now, 25 to 30 teenagers laughing and texting each other as they run to their cars.

Go Hug a Single Mama

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It’s true. You know, single mothers deserve a whole month of free spa days with paid vacation and an on-call nanny. It won’t happen, of course, but there should be a little something more than a card or an almost forgotten card and the celebration should last at least a week.

Single mothers work hard being everything to everyone all the time. It’s a tough job description that takes a special kind of woman to make it work. Most of my generation has taken a stab at single parenting at least once – some, several times. We never list that on our resumes, though. We should, because nothing says I Can Get Things Done like a single woman with a couple of kids, a job, a house to run, and at least one ex-somebody calling regularly to complain. Despite and because of it all, we manage to make the whole shebang run smoothly.

It’s no surprise. We’ve had generations of training. My grandmother was a war widow at 21 – five kids and no high school diploma. Make no mistake – just because there’s a box marked “widowed” on the form, that doesn’t mean the parenting is different. My mother has been married to my dad forever, but her marital status didn’t alter the fact that Dad was on the road most of the time and she was In Charge. Talk to any woman married in the late 50s and early 60s and they’ll tell you about single-parenting with or without the vows. Things were what they were in those days.

I’ve single-parented and now my daughter is, too. It’s not easy and sometimes it’s not fun, but it is what it is. Just tonight she managed to bathe afternoon play dirt and Ranch Dressing out of her son’s hair before the bedtime snuggle. Then she fixed the stopped up sink and repaired the disposal via googled instructions. If we find a wayward spider on the floor tonight, I imagine we’ll kill it ourselves.

Tomorrow’s our day – all of us out there loading the dishwasher and starting a pile of laundry and dragging out the trash now that the kids are in bed. We’re the queens of multitasking and the goddesses of Getting It Done. So bring on the macaroni necklaces and dandelions stolen from the neighbor’s yard – we’re ready to bask in the 24-hour glamor of Mother’s Day and we deserve all 1,440 minutes of it.

Eye on the Prize: Grading Momentum, Self-Denial, and a Request for Good Reading

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I’m two weeks from No More Papers to Grade. Anyone who teaches knows the final jag of the semester is about responding and grading and paperwork and wrapping things up. They also know it’s a self-inflicted time of pleasure-reading famine. There’s simply no time for the foolishness of lounging with a delicious book.

We who teach know all about self-denial. We’re masters of the craft. We don’t visit anyone, take the night off, dream up exciting recipes for veal, or blog. We eat Lean Cuisines from the microwave and wash it down with cold coffee because both are fast. It’s important, though, to dangle a carrot or two to keep us going. Here’s where you come in.
Give me a list of books to look forward to. Dangle the dream of rewarding hours prone on a divan with piles of novels and poetry and anything that doesn’t resemble a freshman argumentative essay. I live to teach, but the grading stack is high just now and the work is daunting. I need a tasty book list to help me make it through final papers and final exams.
Think of it as a public service.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

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It’s a good thing The Perfect Grandson is so young, because he doesn’t know enough about the Easter Bunny and egg hunting anticipation to be disappointed this morning. Big storms are moving in and it looks like Easter is indoors today. The neighbor lady’s wind chimes are swinging fast right now and that’s never a good sign. Cross your fingers that it clears up by mid afternoon for at least one muddy hunt.

Next year, we’ll require perfect sunshine, a thousand colored eggs, and an Easter Bunny who hides goodies in the yard at dark-thirty to beat the boy to the hunt. This year, he’s sleeping in unaware.

Oh. And a big thank you to the mysterious E. Bunny who dropped off the touch-and-feel duckling book in our mailbox yesterday. I know who you are…

NOTE: If you’re into Peeps, the boys over at Poor Richard’s Almanac left a trail to this plethora of peepness.

Dangerous Water

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These Somali pirates aren’t the ones from Treasure Island or even from the old swashbucklers I watched on Saturday afternoons. Remember those old films? The Black Swan was my favorite and I wanted so badly to be sassy Maureen O’Hara loving/hating Tyrone Powers.

These Somali pirates have satellite phones and rocket launchers. They stand to make a fortune hijacking merchant ships. Millions of dollars, in fact. And it doesn’t seem to take a whole lot of them to overthrow a big merchant ship, either. Pirates have been taking ships off the coast of Somalia for so long and with such success that they’ve become cocky about it. Now they have an American captain hostage in what appears to be a toddler’s tub toy surrounded by U.S. naval ships. It’s a hell of a mess and will certainly get messier as the hours pass. These pirates are accustomed to getting what they ask for.

These Somali pirates don’t always choose the big ships. A recent and tragic story involved a French couple, their three year-old son, and two friends. Florent Tanit, father of the little boy, lost his life during the rescue of their yacht. There’s been a little talk here and there about the sailing adventure this family attempted, and the blog they kept that ends just as the Somali pirates took their boat. I found the blog here, although you’ll need to remember your old college French to read it. The pictures are enough anyway.

Pirates aside, I can’t event talk about a man who would put his wife and toddler in such danger. I’ll leave that alone. He can’t fix it now.

While I hope the U.S. Navy /orange plastic tub-toy standoff turns out well, it looks like it may be the beginning of a much larger problem. Black Hawk Down is a terrible memory, and I don’t know how provoked we need to be to go back to Somalia again. This isn’t a costume swashbuckler or kid’s novel, and no one out there is Tyrone Powers.

Captain Richard Phillips, I’m rattling the beads for you.

UPDATE: Captain Phillips has been freed!