Bday Recap

Every birthday is an opportunity to remember the joy in my life. Some years I am in places I love; some years I do things I love; every year I spend the day with people I love.

This year was no exception: Yesterday I woke first and spent the earliest hours of the day watching an amazing shelf cloud swirl down from the north and out to the east. I opened thoughtfully chosen gifts and enjoyed a delicious breakfast with Heidi and my mom. We went to the movies and were immersed in Yesterday, a sweet confection of a film. We enjoyed a delicious meal at a restaurant conceived of by one of the most innovative chefs in the Twin Cities, and when we were satisfied and full, we emerged into a clear evening, neither too hot nor too cool, and walked down to the historic Stone Arch Bridge spanning the Mississippi and St. Anthony's Falls.

Twenty-first Century technology allowed me to see and talk to Bill and Emily, Courtney, Jordan, Richard and Annabelle, and the day ended with a board game and a final chorus of Happy Birthday at my actual birth hour.

I know. Wow! Right?

Best. Wife. Ever

The first week after school is out is usually when I take the time to catch up in my garden. I often say that I love the garden in the summer, but not so much in the spring. That's because in the summer I go every other morning or so, pull weeds, prune and fertilize plants, and harvest the bounty of our springtime labor. But that's only if we actually get the garden in. The spring is full of must-do tasks both at school and in the garden, and it is really hard to find the time to get everything done.

That was especially true this year-- a combination of teaching so many more kids and bad weather kept me behind, and even though we got some stuff in, a busy June made it impossible to keep the garden weeded. My plans were also to leave town for a visit with my mom a couple of days after school got out. So I asked Heidi to go with me to the garden on the morning before my flight left. "Don't worry about it being such a mess," I told her. "Just water it if it doesn't rain. Try not to hate the garden while I'm gone, and I'll clean it up when I get back."

Heidi doesn't love the garden, but she loves me, and so she agreed. Even so, I was a little worried about it, especially since we are heading out of town to visit Heidi's parents a few days after we get back, and "How's the garden?" was one of the first questions I asked when I picked her up at the airport yesterday. She was vague but positive, and I thought I appreciated everything she had done.

That was until this morning when I was opening my birthday gifts. After I was showered with an awesome t-shirt, sweatshirt, 2 pairs of shorts, a camp shirt, Bombas socks and t-shirts,  and a gift certificate for a facial, Heidi told me there was one more thing. She pulled out her phone and handed it to me. "Do you know what that is?" she asked.

It was the garden, but not the way I left it last Sunday. In the week that I was gone, Heidi enlisted the help of family (thank you Treat and Emily!) and friends (Lauren, Lauren, and Traci) to completely weed it out, put down landscape fabric, and mulch over everything. They put hours and hours in to get my garden into the condition where I really can do some projects I never seem to have time for, and actually enjoy it.

I literally wiped tears of gratitude and joy as I scrolled through the pictures, and it felt as if a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. I honestly didn't realize how worried I was about the garden.

But Heidi did.

They See Me Strollin

For a person who has almost everything, I got a lot of nice things for my birthday this year. By far the most photogenic was not actually for me, but rather for my cats.

You see it's come to my attention that while we are out gallivanting on all number of adventures with the dog, they are always stuck at home. And so, when I saw a kitty stroller in lovely lemon yellow last week, I was sorely tempted to buy it. I pushed it all around the store for a good ten minutes, appreciating the smooth handling, convenient bottom storage compartment, and handy collapsible design, but the end I opted out.

Fortunately Heidi alerted my sister, and so the early hours of my birthday were spent outside in the dappled morning sunlight, light breeze blowing, birds singing, and me strolling with my cats and the dog. And yes, there are pictures.

Around the Sun

We were tromping through a lovely meadow toward a footbridge spanning a gurgling stream. The sky was blue and a light breeze ruffled the grasses and wild flowers. It was a perfect birthday moment, one that made me reflect on June 30ths of the past.

"Last year on my birthday we went to the Lucy museum," I reminded Heidi, and this year--" I nodded my head at the frisky red puppy bouncing along the trail between us, chasing dragonflies.

"We love Lucy!" Heidi finished.

Honey Do List

I was cleaning out my desk last week before locking it up for the summer when I came across a little clipping from our monthly wellness newsletter that I had stowed away there several years ago and forgotten ever since. List 20 things that you love to do that generate feelings of joy and vitality for you, it read. Try to do these things within one month. I could see why I might cut out such a thing, and I stuck it in my writing notebook and continued tidying up.

The occasion of my birthday seemed like the perfect time to do the exercise, and so before anyone else got up this morning, I took my coffee and notebook out to the back patio and sat down to make my list.

Ride my bike, I started. Hike in Maine. Eat lobster, Work in the garden; Have fresh-picked sliced tomatoes for dinner. Read outside, drink iced tea and lemonade. Learn something, go some place new, visit a museum. Play my ukulele, build a fire, grill steaks and corn on the cob. Hunt for sea glass and smooth rocks, catch fireflies, let them go, have a water balloon fight, walk to go out for dinner, go to the movies. Listen to jazz records, go swimming, drink beer.

I paused to regard my list-- this was going to be a cinch!

Then I wondered. Am I cheating or am I charmed?

I think it's pretty clear.

It's My Birthday

I'm a take-charge kind of a gal and so this morning I had some definite ideas about how I wanted to spend my birthday. First I wanted to be outside if possible, and I wanted to do something I'd never done before. When at first the weather threatened to drizzle all day, the Theodore Roosevelt Inauguration Site was at the top of my list.

"Isn't it funny," I said to Heidi,"that really? Teddy Roosevelt is not even close to my favorite president, and yet it seems that we have been to a lot of his places." I was referring to Roosevelt Island and Roosevelt National Park, and now this.

But as luck would have it, the weather cleared, and soon Heidi, Louise, and I were off to Old Fort Niagara, an almost 400 year old bastion located  on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River. We spent the afternoon wandering the amazingly well-preserved site learning the history of its Indian, French, British, and American occupants. Then we drove home along the wide river, the Canadian side of the river to our left. We stopped in Lewiston and strolled through a riverside park that happened to mark the final stop in the Underground Railroad. Here, residents of the town rowed escaped slaves across the Niagara to Canada. I bought a bottle of water, and paying with a 20, my change was 18.65, the year the Civil War ended.

Home at last, I prepared a dinner of steamed shrimp, grilled steak, baked potato, and salad, and at the table I sat back and sighed. "Well, I had a really great day!"

Heidi's mom laughed. "Really? You drove and you made dinner!"

"I know," I said, "but I like to drive, and I like to cook, especially because I get to go where I want and eat what I like!"

There was no argument there.

HBD

From the moment I got up this morning and my oldest nephew appeared like an apparition and wished me a happy birthday before mysteriously vanishing again, to the time I spent with him and his girlfriend on the beach learning to navigate the silky, croc-thieving mud so that we could fill our bucket with mussels, to the freshly-squeezed carrot-grapefruit-strawberry juice my brother served us on the granite ledges, to the warm noontime sunshine and perfectly cool breeze I enjoyed while tossing the tennis ball for the dogs, to the time we spent exploring the scenic back roads of this rural peninsula on the way to John B Mountain where the trail to the top is so springy it's like mini-trampolines propelling you forward until you reach those granite ledges with views of Camden and Rockport to the west and Mount a Desert Island to the east, to the inexplicably natural art-laden trail along the Penobscot Bay on the way to Goose Falls, to all the birthday love on Facebook, and my niece and nephew singing, facetiming my mom as I relaxed on the deck listening to the gulls screech and Josh softly strumming his guitar, while the daylight slips away with the tide and my birthday feast is being prepared inside, I couldn't have conjured a more wonderful day.

A Naturally Wonderful Birthday

We spent the afternoon at Niagara Falls. After three days of rain, the weather cleared into a birthday-miracle, 75 degrees and sunny, blue skies and puffy white clouds kind of a day. We got a great parking space less than a block from a really cool street festival that we had no idea was going on. After grabbing lunch at the food trucks, where there were several vegan options, we crossed the street and walked the shady paths to the twin bridges that span the raging Niagara river on its inevitable course to the American Falls ans Bridal Veil Falls. Despite being crowded (it was after all a Sunday), the international crowd was quite companionable and courteous in our polyglot fashion, wordlessly stepping in and away from the railing in an improvised choreography to allow for any desired photo op. An Indian family handed me their iPad for a group shot, and of course I was happy to oblige. Every now and then, the wind would shift and we would all be refreshed by the errant mist. Below us we saw those who had paid for extra access; prowling the redwood boardwalks in their complimentary sandals and thin yellow plastic ponchos, they embraced the spray, many allowing themselves to be drenched by the falls. Next we climbed the steps and passed the visitor center to get our best view of Horseshoe Falls. The stench of a thousand seagull nests, inaccessible and invisible, but just a hundred feet below us, detracted slightly from the view, but rounding a gentle curve, we saw a real cloud rising, made of the vapor from the falls and pure white against cerulean; everything I learned in fourth grade science about weather was captured in that image, and once again, at Niagara Falls, I understood the meaning of "natural wonder."

Saturday Night Special

I was born on a Saturday night fifty years ago today, and this morning I sat on a gigantic deck overlooking Pinkham Bay in Steuben, Maine considering my birthday dinner. My whole family has traveled thousands of miles from Minnesota, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to spend the week with me, and nothing could be more special than that. Even so, we have to eat, and meals are always a celebration for us. I knew there would be lobster, of course, but what else should we have?

When we were kids, our usual Saturday night dinner was steak, french fries, salad, and sauteed mushrooms, peppers, and onions. My mom bought an economical cut of beef, grilled or broiled it, and then sliced it thin. A few shakes of Lawry's seasoned salt and it was the finest of entrees to us. My dad peeled the potatoes and hand-cut them for the fries. He also cut up the onions and peppers-- and that is most of the cooking I ever remember him doing. As for the salad, iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, celery, and tomatoes with Wish Bone Italian dressing was a delicious compliment to the meal. We loved it.

2601 Saturday nights in, I decided to go with a classic, updated to be sure, but the steaks are grilling right now.

Dissatisfied Customer

I just wrote three decent paragraphs and lost them to the profoundly flawed wifi access that this cheap hotel provides. To be sure, I had a much more generous perspective on the place before their idiotic Internet access caused me to lose my writing. Now? I calls them like I sees them:

Run down, tacky, two-bit, tourist trap.

Yeah! Take that hotel!

Dispatch

My birthday today, and I write from the garden where I came to weed and water thoroughly before literally heading for the hills for a couple of days. (We're taking the older nephews to a ranch in the Blue Ridge for some cabin-camping and horseback riding.) A dead robin in the flower bed was a sad start to the morning, but the weather is glorious and a goldfinch perching prettily on one of the tomato cages was somewhat of an antidote to that gloom.

The birds like the water, and now there's a pair of finches hopping and playing in the sprinkler spray. They glow in the sunlight, and I choose them as the heralds of my next year.

Help Wanted

A big chunk of of my day yesterday was spent in a conference room as part of a committee interviewing for a teaching vacancy on my team. There were several candidates, and I would have been happy to work with any of them, but obviously the whole idea was to pick the best one. With that in mind, we asked a series of questions about planning, assessment, differentiation, philosophy, discipline, technology, teaming, inter-disciplinary units, and what the students should take with them at the end of the course. After a while, it all ran together, and if you asked me to described the people we interviewed without referring to my notes, I might say:

energetic undisciplined creative inexperienced polished rambling well-versed uninspiring knowledgeable clueless thoughtful unprepared student-centered short intense-eye-contact tall young firm-handshake thirsty

All four of us on the committee were women, as were four of the six applicants for the job. Three of the people we spoke to were applying for their very first teaching job, two straight out of school, and one as a "career-switcher." The others had between 3-11 years of experience.

The interviews were informative, but the conversations we had in between were way more interesting. So often it seems that a person will have an advantage in teaching because he is male. This was true with at least one member of our interview team: "If we can get a qualified man, we should," she said. There was discussion about our professional responsibility to encourage and support new teachers, and the time it takes to do that. We talked about the programs that expedite certification for career-switchers and whether or not they properly prepare their participants for the classroom, and what made a new colleague a "project" versus somebody who might fit right in.

In the end, I think we made a sound choice, but only time will tell. I'm in no hurry to apply for a job, though, of that I am very certain.

Happy Birthday to Me

I spent my eighteenth birthday at Heathrow Airport. I was working as a counselor at a summer school outside of London, and it was my job that day to collect the students flying in from some forty different countries and direct them to the school van circling outside. We had names and flight numbers, of course, and there I was, that person holding that sign when you exit customs.

In between flights, I was on my own at the airport, which wasn't an unfamiliar place at all for an airline brat like me. I browsed the bookshops and kiosks, and made myself comfortable in hard orange plastic chairs nibbling chocolate and reading magazines. The weirdest thing about the day was that no one but me knew it was my birthday. I wasn't sure what to do with the information: I hadn't known anyone I was working with for longer than a couple of days, and it didn't seem like it was relevant, so as I wandered the airport shepherding nervous kids, every now and then I'd startle myself with the reminder that this day was my birthday-- I was 18. It was like wiggling a loose tooth-- I would forget all about it when I was occupied with something else, but once I remembered it, I couldn't leave it be. Alone, doing my job in the middle of thousands of strangers from all over the world, I wondered if this was what it was like to be an adult.

That night after all the new students were checked in with lights out, I sat in one of the other counselor's room playing cards and drinking warm ale that someone had fetched from the pub down the road and feeling pretty grown up having made it through my first solo bithday. There came a merry knock at the Tudor diamond glass window we had pushed open to the cool night air, and there was my mom and dad and brother and sister! They had re-routed their flight home from vacation in Portugal to stop overnight in London and surprise me. We spent a happy ninety minutes celebrating with my new colleagues-- "Why didn't you tell us it was your birthday?" they scolded me-- and then at midnight, my family left to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel before their flight, and I went off to bed, too, still feeling pretty grown up, but also really glad that I hadn't been alone on my birthday.