It's the Little Things

"Do you have a stylus I can borrow?" one of my homeroom students asked this morning.

"I think I do," I said, and went over to open my top desk drawer. Another student was standing nearby as I rummaged through a collection of pens and pencils that was probably twice her age. "Here ya go!" I said, producing a stylus that was a teacher appreciation gift about 5 years ago.

"You have so much stuff in there!" the student said, and agreeably I started to pull a few of the trinkets out. There was a fidget counter that everyone competed with to see who could get the most clicks in 30 seconds. There were 2 yo-yos and a rubber popper that were also very popular. Way in the back I found the working catapult-pencil sharpener that a friend brought back from England a decade or so ago. I also had some clown noses that I bought at the suggestion of one of my homeroom students in 2011 as prizes for a joke-telling contest. 

"Why do you have all that?" asked one of the kids.

"Because it's fun!" I answered. 

He couldn't argue with that logic.

Gotta Do

Community spread of COVID is increasing in our area, and so I have returned to wearing a mask in school. 

It was just ahead of a likely pitched battle with the newly-elected governor that our district implemented a three-tiered mask policy. When numbers are low, masks are optional, when they are medium, masks are recommended, and when they are high, masks are required for staff. Since we are going to be living with COVID for the unforeseeable future, such a policy makes sense to me, and so after a year of masking, I removed mine when the data indicated it was safe to do so. 

At school, kids were more hesitant. Proportionately? They have been wearing masks for a pretty large part of their lives, and removing them seemed strange. They also looked to their peers, and not many kids were unmasking. The same was true for my colleagues: the vast majority of them continued to wear masks at school. 

And at first, when I pulled the elastic straps of my light gray K94 mask over my ears yesterday and greeted the kids returning from spring break, no one even noticed. "Why are you wearing your mask again?" a student asked at lunchtime.

"The numbers are up in our area," I said. 

"They are?" he replied with some alarm. "I'm going to start wearing mine again, too."

A Lesson in Sharing

Our school is a mixed-use facility, which means, among other things, that groups can rent space and use our classrooms on weekends. As such, it's always been a bit irksome to me to arrive at school on Monday morning and find this or that out of place, or this or that left behind. Some of my reaction is undoubtedly related to the proprietary feelings I have for this room I have occupied for so many years, but it is also the failure to respect my professional space: I doubt that the principal or building administrator would be happy if people used their offices when they weren't there. 

Anyway, a few weeks ago I came in on Monday to find my room in disarray and the screen on my iPad smashed. I took photos and sent them to the facilities manager, along with a request that my classroom be removed from the rotation for a while. In return, I got a tepid apology and no assurances. When some unkind words were scrawled on my chalk board a couple of weeks later, I sent another picture and received the terse reply that no one was scheduled in my room that weekend.

But today when I returned from 10 days away over spring break, my room was neat and orderly, better than I had left it. I was thankful, too, until a colleague a couple of doors down came by. "Was there a bubble machine in here this morning?" she asked.

"Huh?" I replied.

Just then the guy across the hall came in. "I had one in my room, too," he nodded.

I had to go see them! Sure enough, the folks who used their rooms had left behind devices about the size of an electric pencil sharpener that when plugged in? 

Generate a steady stream of soap bubbles! Which is obviously way better than vandalism and graffiti. I am going to have to borrow those.

They're Circling

"I can't believe you're 60!" my aunt said to me the other day.

"Hey now!" I cried. "I'm not, yet! I still have 75 more days!"

"How do you know that?" she laughed and my uncle joined in.

The way I know how many days to my birthday is an overly complicated story involving the 100 Day Writing Challenge, dancing every day, and of course, my birth date, but rather than go into it, I shrugged. "I just do."

A little while later we were watching all the birds in the woods right behind her new place. "Wow!" I noted, "there are a lot of buzzards!"

"Go away!" my uncle called. "She's not 60 yet!"

A New One on Me

After a warm week, Easter Sunday dawned a crisp Spring day, full of blue skies, warm sunshine, and cool air. Heidi and I met some neighbors downtown for a full circuit of the National Mall. Notably, all the fountains and pools were completely drained of water, their granite and cement scrubbed clean of algae and gunk.

Tourists took advantage of the situation and, ducking under flimsy barriers, walked on the bottom of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, the WWII fountain, and the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, replacing the ducks and geese who usually preside there.

 It was a sight I have never seen before in all my years in this city.

Check, Check, and Check

Unintentionally, the theme of this spring break has become checking things off the not since COVID list. Monday was a visit to Mt. Vernon, Wednesday was the movies, and today Heidi and I drove the hour it takes to visit my Aunt Harriett. She is my mom's sister, and at 85 is the last survivor of that generation on my sister, my brother and my side of the family. I last saw her in February of 2020, right before everything shut down. A few days later, she and her husband moved from the home she had lived in since 1962 to a nearby retirement community. 

In the 2 years since, we've face-timed and spoken on the phone, but it didn't really compare to that big hug I got this afternoon and the smell of the perfume she's been wearing all my life. It was a fun afternoon, and we stayed longer than we planned to. Before we left, we made plans to meet again soon for some genealogy research and lunch at the American Legion in Greenbelt. 

I can't wait.

A Sort of Spring Cleaning

It felt good today to get back into my garden for the first time this season. The weather was perfect for it: 65 and sunny with a light breeze. With Treat's help, I got all the beds cleared and about half or the other space. It'll take several hours to get the whole job done, but today was a good start. 

Another thing we did was turn the compost. I have three bins that I have been filling, one since I got the garden in 2009, another since about 2018, and a third since last summer. All the weeds and unusable vegetables go in there, plus the plants when I clean out at the end of each season. The newer bins were easy to turn-- we simply removed the front slats and pitch-forked the contents out. From them, we got about 5 5-gallon buckets of nice, dry compost to add to the beds we had cleared. Then we layered the bigger, unbroken stalks and stems with the weeds we had pulled today, and some of the dry compost, too. 

Afterwards we put some contractor bags over the top to heat it up and some cobble stones from the garden to hold them down. I have great faith that it will turn into the best compost ever, a belief I repeated to Treat more than a few times. He is very tolerant of his auntie, though, and listened without complaint. 

The third bin was there when we were first assigned to our plot. A repurposed trash bin that sat wheel-less in one of the overgrown corners of the garden, it, along with the huge manhole that usurps a big space in the middle, the rat bait trap on the fence line, and the weeds that had overrun the whole plot did not daunt me when first I took stewardship, although they probably should have. And indeed, the bait trap was removed right away, the manhole is a perfect place to set a container garden, and the weeds, well, every year they reign a little less supreme. But that compost bin? I did manhandle to a spot against the fence a couple years ago, but emptying it or turning it? I've never had it in me to start that task. 

Until today. Treat and I brought it over to the other bins and dumped it out. For 13 years of clippings and such, its contents were unimpressive, but when we got to the bottom we found some electronic sprinkler thing, a bone, and all manner of trash that had been left by the previous gardeners. The experience was a cross between an archaeological experience and just plain gross. But we tossed the garbage, and incorporated the other contents into the greatest compost ever, and then dragged that bin back to its corner where it can continue to do its job for many more years to come.