Beginning again

A snapshot of our morning:

Isaac is busy with a puzzle on the floor; he is very into puzzles these days, and we have these great Melissa & Doug wooden puzzles stacked in the family room. It's adorable until he chooses one that is just a little too difficult, because then it's all "Need HELP" again and again and again, sorry if you were thinking you would enjoy a quiet cup of coffee or wanted to clean the kitchen right now. Although that's what I'm doing, for the time being -- just enjoying a quiet cup of coffee while he plays happily. The dog is snoring, the laundry is humming, and Suzannah is watching a video for a bit. The morning feels cool. We've been waking up to cloudy skies that give way to sunshine in the afternoon, and this fills me with deep contentment. And I'm actually looking forward to the rain, if it ever returns. We're going on over forty days without it.

Labor Day often finds me feeling sort of anxious; I always have school, sometimes the very first day of school, the next day. This year I have more of a buffer than I ever have. Tomorrow is another staff development day and I've heard lovely rumors that we'll get to spend quite a bit of time in our own classrooms. The day after that is technically the first day, but it's mostly for the freshmen, so really I don't meet my kids until Thursday. My first real week of teaching is only two days long, and then I have a weekend to process. Nice.

Also, we've had a really idyllic weekend. Friday was kind of chaotic -- I did lots of frenetic running around town for the first six hours of my day -- but we spent the sunny afternoon hours at the splash park, which felt like the perfect way to end our last week of summer. On Saturday, Matt and I both had the idea of getting out of the city, so he found a trail we've never hiked and we headed into the mountains. Both kids did so well; Isaac hardly even rode in the backpack, and Suzannah was so proud of her stamina. ("I think this is a very good hike for me," she said.) I just loved to watch her noticing everything -- the water, the moss on the trees, the shape of things. Rocks, or hollow logs, or spindly trees growing out of ancient tree stumps. We were on the trail for over two hours, and by the time we made it to one of our favorite haunts for dinner, we were all happily starving.

This morning Matt slipped out of bed at dawn, whispering that the coffeepot was ready to go. He's spending his morning hiking solo, and when he comes home we're all heading to the zoo for a picnic. And after that, Matt and the kids will play at the zoo while I sit at a nearby coffee shop and work on my lesson plans for the first few weeks of school. This sounds like a nearly perfect day to me, actually. I've taken the kids to the zoo plenty of times this summer, so I don't really mind skipping this round, and also, I just really love lesson planning. It's creative work for me, and I find few things as energizing as thinking about literature I love and ways in which I can share it with teenagers. Even if they don't all love it, the challenge of creating meaningful experiences for diverse groups of kids is really exciting to me.

Anyway, I'm in a good place right now. I've told people I'm about a hundred times more relaxed than I was at this time last year, and it's true. For one thing, I'm not sending my beautiful baby girl off to school for the very first time. I already know she'll be fine; I already know that we love our little neighborhood school, and I'm pretty confident that we'll slip back into the familiar rhythms of our day. For another thing, I'm also pretty confident that this year I will not receive a phone call on a Sunday night a few weeks into the school year informing me that two of my classes are flipping to something entirely different, giving me less than 24 hours to prep for a class I haven't taught in years -- with the extra fun of knowing that kids will trickle in a few at a time for an entire month, so I can't really start a real unit until, what, mid-October? November? And then what I didn't know is that I would spend the rest of the year with two classes that made me absolutely dread going to work every single day. Let me tell you, after last year I was genuinely worried that I wouldn't ever recover, that I was damaged goods who didn't even belong in a classroom.

But we had a wonderful, restorative summer. Apparently, it worked. This is why teachers need summers, in case you were wondering.

This is my twelfth year, and I know that there will be times -- in January, say, or March, which is often kind of a dreadful month -- when I'm going to be disillusioned and frustrated and exhausted. But it's good to know that in this golden September before my twelfth year of teaching, I'm still in love with it, and I still believe, deep down, that the key to saving the world lies in the connections we make in the classroom. I still really believe that poetry will save us in the end.