Primary Source

One of the students who is interviewing me for the profile project has chosen gardening as her angle. Because they have to get some secondary quotes, she asked me who else has "seen me gardening."

My nephew, Treat, has helped me before, I told her. Since my budding journalists have a limited travel budget, most of them rely on the kindness of their subject to pass along their written questions. As it is the 21st century, some have used Google Docs and email for this task, but I have a stack of index cards for those who want or need to go old school. The kids persist in calling them postcards, though, a misdesignation which I find so charming that I never correct them. And so it was that this particular student brought me a collection of three "postcards" for Treat:

Hi Ms. S's Nephew I need to ask you some questions about her because I'm doing the thing about her, read the first one, and below that the word Questions! with lots of dots and underlines. At the bottom it read From Samantha R

The next card had two questions: Have you ever seen her struggle when she's gardening? and have you noticed her strengths?

And the final card asked, how can you describe her garden in 3 words?

Rather than transcribe the inquiry, I texted photos of the cards to Treat. As a potential primary source, I wanted him to appreciate the primary questions. I believe he did, because his answers were very much in the spirit of the project:

1) I've never observed ms s. struggling in the garden. I do believe that there is an upward limit to her strength but I haven't observed it

2) yes, as mentioned, I haven't been able to determine her strength exactly but I believe it to be very great

3) the vegetables!!! yum!!

I can't wait to share them with Samantha!

A is for Air Conditioning

When I was a kid, we did not have air conditioning and neither did many people we knew. Back then, the windows were always open, and if you had a box fan wedged between the sill and the sash on hot nights, you were lucky. Even so, our pillows and hair were damp with sweat each morning. We didn't care though: barefoot, in shorts, or bathing suits, being hot in summer was normal, and we swam through the heat like fish through water.

Air conditioning changed everything, and now at the slightest threat of hot weather, we close up the house like a box and crank the a/c, sealing ourselves away from any discomfort. Summer days inside are so gelid that the heat is like a wall when you finally go out.  I have noticed that when I leave school in the early evenings, my skin is literally refrigerated; it stays unnaturally cold for a good ten minutes

Here at home, though, it seems that our heat pump is a total loss, and so we have spent the last couple of days sweating, windows open, looking for the slightest trace of a cross breeze. Just like the old days, all our meals are light and cool (the stove would add way too much heat to the house), the dog pants contentedly on the cool tile floor, and we sleep with nothing but a sheet covering us.

Perhaps it's because I know the a/c will be fixed tomorrow, but tonight, far from being hot and cranky, I am inclined to let summer in. 

Life Lesson: “Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” ~Russell Baker

B is for Birthday Buddies

Perhaps it stems from an inflated estimate of my own importance, but I have long believed that one’s birthday is a very special day and should be well-marked, and as such, I have always had an excellent memory for birthdays. When I was a kid, birthdays seemed like singular events, and the only people I knew who shared one were the twins next door, Lois and Laura. The more people I met, however, the more the birthdays doubled, and even tripled, up.

For example, my friend Mary shares her birthday with my brother-in-law, Jordan, and there is a week in July where my nephew Treat and our god-daughter Delaney have the same birthday, as do Treat’s brother, Riley and our other nephew, Kyle, and Delaney’s sister Allyn and our dearest dog, Isabel.

And now that I’ve been teaching for a while, there are birthday buddies for everyone. It only makes sense when you consider 2000 kids spread over 366 days. In addition to my own birthday buddies, Abby and Matt , I’ve even known a couple of February 29-ers—if they’d like someone to commiserate with for getting the short straw when it comes to birthdays, I can definitely hook them up!

Somewhere along the line I began to consider celebrity birthdays, too, and soon the notion of famous birthday buddies became a minor fascination.

How interesting to think that my brother shared his birthday with Thomas Jefferson, and my sister hers with Florence Nightingale, Yogi Berra, and Katherine Hepburn. My mother’s birthday buddies are George HW Bush and Anne Frank, but my dad and I never really seemed to have anyone very impressive, or even that recognizable.

In the last few years, my birthday buddy list has expanded a bit to include Vincent D’Onofrio, Mike Tyson, and Michael Phelps, but I’m still waiting for someone to represent our special day in a more historical way. I wonder if those guys are waiting, too.

Life Lesson:
You say it's your birthday?
Well, it's my birthday too, yeah!
They say it's your birthday—
we’re gonna have a good time.
I'm glad it's your birthday.
Happy birthday to you.
We’re gonna have a party, party!
~John Lennon and Paul McCartney

C is for Charlotte's Web

I was out for a walk a couple of weeks ago when at last I heard the final chapter of the Alexander Hamilton biography that had occupied my time and mind for three months. At a loss for what to listen to next, I punched play on another, shorter biography that I had downloaded two summers ago, the last time we were in Maine. It is the story of EB White's life, but the angle is clear in the title: The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B.White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic.

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Charlotte's Web. I remember when my second grade teacher, Miss King, read it to our class. Everyone was in tears on the day we heard chapter 21, Last Day. 

As a student and a teacher of writing, I have come to recognize the magical simplicity of E.B. White's prose. My sixth graders often to look to their independent reading books to find examples of the crafts and tools of the professional. Once when we were studying figurative language, a student came to me with her copy of Charlotte's Web. "I can't find anything," she complained.

"Really?" I asked, and borrowed the book for a moment. She was right. White does not embellish his tale with comparisons. His description is solid, detailed, and real, grounding the reader in the timeless truth of the fantasy.

A few years ago I purchased the audio recording of E.B. White himself reading his most famous book. The story goes that it took all day and several takes in the studio until he could read the lines at the end of chapter 21 without breaking down. Even so, you can clearly hear the crack in his voice when he gets to that part of the story.

Well, you can if you're not crying too hard yourself.

When I first started teaching, I read Charlotte's Web to a first grade summer school class I was teaching, but most of the kids were unmoved when we came to Last Day. "Didn't you guys think that was sad?" I asked them, after covertly wiping a tear from my nose.

"What?" asked one little boy.

"When Charlotte died," I answered.

"What? Charlotte died?!" he repeated. Everyone seemed a little shocked. 

"Yeah," I said, and re-read the passage at the end of the chapter: 

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

He burst into tears, and soon the whole class was crying.

That's more like it, I thought.

Life Lesson:  “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.” ~E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

D is for Dead or Alive?

"Is Ms. S here today?" a student asked one of my colleagues in home room.

"Yes," the teacher answered.

"Oh good," the student replied.

"Why? Did you miss her?" the teacher asked.

"No! I was worried she might be dead," the student said.

Oh my! Rumors fly when you are out unexpectedly for a couple of days!

Never fear kids-- you're stuck with me for another month. (Knock wood!)

Life Lesson: "Always wear a helmet when biking, skating, skiing, or jumping to conclusions." ~Anonymous

E is for Educational Experiences Everywhere

 My mom is in town until tomorrow, and since she lives so far away, it just seemed like a missed opportunity to go to work while she was still here. So I took the day off, and we decided to explore a couple of the lesser-known attractions in our very historic and cultural area.

First stop? Woodlawn Plantation, a home that was built in 1800 by George Washington's nephew and his bride, Martha Washington's granddaughter. Originally the main residence on a 2000 acre farm that Washington gave the couple as a wedding gift, today's much smaller property is only about three miles from Mount Vernon. The house, with its two-foot thick brick walls, survives today despite being abandoned in the late 1800s, and is actually grander than Mount Vernon in some ways.

On the very same property, there is also a mid 20th century dwelling designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Pope-Leighey House was originally constructed in 1949 in Falls Church, but the expansion of Route 66 in 1967 created a move it or lose it imminent domain situation that was resolved by an imaginative deal with the US Register of Historic Places which resulted in moving the home piece-by-piece 20 miles to the south and rebuilding it on a corner of the Woodlawn property. This design is an example of Wright's Usonian ideals, or a small, functional house for a regular family (as long as they didn't Have any furniture or need any storage!). It was cool, though, and it would have fit right in with a current episode of Tiny Houses.

Our next stop was Gunston Hall, George Mason's home, built in 1750. It, too, was a pleasant surprise. Remarkably preserved and restored, the house looked deceptively compact from the outside, but it has 2400 square feet on each level. It's main hall, eight bedrooms, formal dining room, and two parlors were gracious and spacious. In fact, the main parlor is one of the 100 most beautiful rooms in America, according to Helen Comstock's book. It's hard to disagree when you stand beneath the 12 foot ceiling, surrounded by intricately carved walnut moulding, crimson silk damask walls, deep blue paint, and gilded trim.

On a Monday in May, we had each of these places, these gems, practically to ourselves, and besides being a really fun day? We learned a lot! Plus I got to spend the day with my mom.🙂

Life Lesson: "There's treasure everywhere." --Bill Watterson

F is for Finding Fun

Today was the 9th annual Post Hunt, a crazy puzzle-palooza that sends participants scampering around downtown trying to solve big, silly puzzles. My nephew, Treat, and I have been doing it together since it started back in 2008, and over the years we've enlisted Josh, my mom, and this year, my brother Bill joined the team!

Before leaving the convention center, the five of us cheerfully watched an ear-splitting performance from a tuba, oboe, violin, and piano (answer: tu o vi pi, or 206314) and then found ourselves in the middle of a demonstration by the rainbow coalition brandishing colorful signs with rebus symbols on them. (In ROYGBIV order the signs read: pea-knock-L deck mine-s golden rings, 43 of course.)

Even the pouring rain couldn't dampen our spirits as we searched out a giant white square with a little 76 in the upper lefthand corner, and we huddled under the umbrella a long time before making an association with the crossword puzzle in the back of the magazine. Solving the two clues gave us fen and fight.

The letter F just didn't seem right, but we decided to move on to the next one. On the way, Treat connected fen and fight with one of the illustrations on the map, and we made a detour. There we found an identical square with an E where the F might be. Stumped, we continued on our way to a park where a volunteer held this sign:

 C-11 on the map was the Reflecting Pool, so Mom whipped out a mirror and, upon examining the lower left-hand flourish, backward, we read Date of Abe's Address (answer? 1119)

We were walking to our next challenge, still thinking, considering, and pondering the one we hadn't solved, when Treat realized that if we swapped the E for the F in the crossword, we had een and eight, or eighteen.

The last puzzle was a web address that, once pulled up on our phone's browsers gave us the warning, Watch your temperature. You’re almost freezing. You’re risking hypothermia. You need to be normal. Hint: Get the blood circulating. Walking around may help!

It was basically a high-tech version of the warmer-cooler-burning up game we used to play as kids, and we knew that we were looking for the place where our reading would be 98.6. There we found a giant blue C, which we took to mean that we needed to convert our temperature to Celsius. (37 was correct!)

Satisfied at solving the first part of the hunt we grabbed a table at the convention center, ate our picnic lunch, and mulled over the five clues we had. With half an hour to go until the final clue and the commencement of the end game, it seemed like anything was possible, but I didn't care if we won; the day was perfect already.

Life Lesson: “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” ~Dale Carnegie