Flying Over the Chesapeake

 Riddle: What do you call a bird that flies over the Chesapeake?

A bay-gull!

Look what I made today:

Growth Mindset

After an afternoon spent battling mugwort, just the latest skirmish in an 11 season war, I came home, scrubbed the dirt from beneath my nails and turned to the internet. There I found a source for mugwort seeds (!) (noooooooooooooo!), but also several articles on the medicinal and culinary benefits of the very weed that has been the bane of my garden from the moment I began to clear it for planting. 

I want to appreciate this plant, I do, and I am impressed that it can be used to treat congestion, stress, headaches, poison ivy, and even breech births, not to mention stir-fried, added to soups and salads, mochi and rice cakes, used to season goose and even to bitter beer instead of hops. I want to flip my perspective and see mugwort as a crop instead of an invader, or at least a volunteer, but...

I’m just not there 

Yet!

Not Fair

 What do you call 52 degrees and rainy on the first day the pool is open?

Try to Remember

I was talking up the teacher-for-a-day activity this morning, trying to encourage more kids to design a fun lesson and take over the class during the last couple weeks of school. In the past it's been a great way to end the year, novel, engaging, and very student-directed, but this year concurrent learning has put a bit of a damper on the project and fewer kids have stepped forward. So there I was, really pitching it, giving examples of past lessons. 

"There was a great one on bottle flipping!" I said. "I know that was a thing a while ago, but it was fun." 

 "A while ago?" said one kid incredulously. "Try five years!" 

 "Was it really that long ago?" I marveled. "Well, it doesn't seem like it to me!" 

 "Five years was a looooooong time ago!" he insisted. 

 "To you, sure," I conceded, "but to me? Not so much."

"How can time be different?" he scoffed.

"Think about it," I said. "I'm about five times your age." And there I paused, because that itself seemed impossible, even to me. Then I pressed on. "So, to me? Five years seems like one year seems to you." 

I thought it made perfect sense, and I had actually had a similar conversation with a student in the class before. She was contesting my suggestion that she add more information about her current life to her letter to her future self. "I think I'll remember everything about myself," she shrugged. "It's me! And it's only six years in the future."

Really?" I said. "Six years ago you were six. Do you remember everything about that?"

She swallowed and lowered her eyes. "No," she admitted. 

"That's all I'm saying," I told her. "Trust me: you'll appreciate the detail."

And I know that she will, because there are times when I read back over my own little time capsule that this blog has become and have no recollection either of the event I documented or the people I was writing about. In fact, in a few years, I'm sure I'll have no idea which kids these were.

Best of the Best

Noon today found me telling my homeroom students how much I appreciated them. They were willingly working on an activity where they imagine that one of the United Nation Global Goals had actually been achieved; the task was to describe that world in poetry, essay, narrative, or visual art. I played John Lennon's Imagine as they worked on descriptions of a world without poverty, social injustice, pollution, economic disparity, limited education and health care. "You guys are definitely one of the best homerooms I've ever had!" I told them, and I meant it. "You always give the activities a chance, and you usually see their value. It's amazing!"

"What were your other TAs like?" someone asked.

"Oh, I've had some good ones-- we have sung and danced and crafted and created and worked hard, but what's really amazing is that our TA has never even al been in the same room, and we've had a great year."

"How many TAs have you had?" asked another student.

"Twenty-nine!" I answered, and they were duly impressed.

"What about me?" one kid joked. "Am I the smartest, best student you ever had?"

"You are definitely in the top 3000!" I told him.

Generations

"I found out today that Julia Child is one of my student's great-great aunt!" my friend Mary told me today.

I was impressed, but then I started questioning how closely they were actually related. "So she was his great-grandmother or great-grandfather's sister?" I mused. "By blood or marriage?"

Mary told me she would investigate further, but we both agreed it was pretty cool. 

As luck would have it, I have a picture of my own great-grandmother on the desktop of my computer. I recently came across it while browsing the hints on my genealogy website. A stark black and white photo, she had it taken for her passport in 1919. Her head is tilted and the entire left side of her face is in shadow, but it is the first image I ever recall seeing of my father's grandmother, who died just 4 years before I was born, and I'm pretty sure I never met any of her siblings. 

These days, great-grandparents are quite common; almost all of my mother's friends had "great-grands" as they called the children of their grandchildren. I suppose it wouldn't be uncommon for those little ones to know the brothers and sisters of their great-grandparents, especially in a close family. And when I consider myself as a middle generation, rather than on either end of this familial spectrum, great-great aunts don't really seem so distant. My older nephews are both in their mid-to-late twenties, and were they to have any children, then my own dear Aunt Harriett would be their great-great aunt, not such a vast span at all.

Have Them Your Way

Just as surely as the cicadas emerge every 17 years, so, too, do the recipes for them. Most articles and interviews profile chefs, nutritionists, and scientists in a quest to normalize insect eating and thereby improve life on the planet by adding a more sustainable protein to everyone's diet. 

Described alternately as soft shell crab like or nutty, cicada tacos, sushi, brownies, and dipped in chocolate dominate the food press, just as I remember happening in 2004 and 1987. 

I wonder: Will 2021 be a true turning point toward greater insect consumption or just another flash-fried cicada in the pan?