News from the Green Swamp

I have been in a funk for the last couple of days since I heard that our beloved Lacoochee Elementary School principal, Karen Marler, was summarily jerked from her post. Officially the superintendent of schools here in Pasco County, Heather Fiorentino, says nothing. The official word is that Karen will be gone for a short time.

When I went to the school today, the mood was black bunting, though no one can say, no one knows Lips are sealed.Certainly not Sunshine! Felt more like a Chinese scene to me.

Of course we all speculate about what has happened and we think of possible causes for this sudden recall. Political? Karen is an independent thinker, her bottom line is the kids and the community that is pulling itself up by the bootstraps. She has been out in front in the energy required to get it happening. She has also been a vocal critic of the relentless FCATs, though on her watch the school consistently made good grades - until this year when the school rating plummeted from an A to a C. Some teachers tell me that the reason for this is an influx of non English speakers.

Whatever, no one ever examines what, if anything, this means.

I am profoundly unhappy with all this. Here is one of America's extremely poor communities and the real leader is the elementary school principal who truly cares about the kids and their families. Amazingly, Karen and many other community citizens have begun to fashion a renaissance. This has attracted state and national attention!

I know nothing about what happened this week. In this case I cannot imagine that there were the usual anomalous sins people get caught up in.

But, despite the general depression in the school today, I had a wonderful time with "my second grade group". After several weeks of examining insects and spiders, the kids really know how to observe. The classroom bristles with cages , of dead and live bugs, shoe boxes punched with holes, and full of grasshoppers and katydids.

We went on an official treasure hunt in the woods behind the school, looking for critters, and almost every team came up with every item. They know the parts of insects. (Ms. Molly, how you spell abdomenthorax?)

We passed the parents who are working on the community garden and the kids asked if they have seen any caterpillars?

And then, as we were making our books about the stuff we had collected, one kid announced that there were apples in the boys' bathroom toilet.

An uproar, of course. Seven year olds do not have front teeth! Silly me. They do not want me to think ill of them, so throw it down the john.. So, we can use the net we have for butterfly catching, and viola! no apples in the john.

I love those kids and their wonderful teacher. Something in me will curl up in a frizzle if that amazing principal is ground into dust by the "system".

My sister, the Pilgrim

My youngest sister took off a couple of months from life this summer to walk the Santiago Pilgrimage trail across northern Spain. It was a life dream. She went with her daughter, Grace, who is a student at Evergreen College, and who got credit for her experience! Tomorrow, she'll be heading back to her life as a tile artist in the northwest. And Grace will be heading off to adventures in Egypt!

When she gets home she will, no doubt, be punished for doing this amazing and selfish thing. It's part of the territory for those of us who take off from time to time.

I have been so interested in their travels as I have heard from emails along the way. Irene is soon to be sixty three, a master swimmer and up for anything. What an adventure!

My littlest sister has done an awesome thing and her grandchildren will love the tales about it. I have had a teeniest bit of envy I won't deny. But I have had many adventures as well, and I am not at all sure I could have walked 800 miles in two months as they did. I loved hearing the answers to my questions about the trail, the people she met, the conditions, the food .. The religious part of it is hard for me to understand, but the artistic part is so real.

Just think about this. Irene, a tiny, fit woman, walks all this distance wearing a handmade dress every day that has emblazoned on it a large virgin Mary on the front and on the back. Early on in the trek she shaved her head in front and made dreadlocks in back. And so, she was known along the trail.

I salute this! I think of the treks I made with my best friend through the Amazon forests at night, pawing through the vines, looking for snakes,dressed in jungle gear,(not thinking about hair-dos) and never encountering so much as a smidgen of Catholicism. We were pikers!

All these two months Irene has been on her pilgrimage, I have followed her progress on my map. I dream about her, I think about where she is now, she is in my thoughts. I know she has put one foot in front of the other for so many miles it must have put her soul at ease.

I am hoping that Irene will make a tile composite about the pilgrimage.

Back here in the Green Swamp we are preparing for the party of a lifetime and Irene will be there! I shall make time to hear in detail about the pilgrimage.

Not to be too smug, but everyone ought to have sisters. My two are so amazing in their special ways.

Alone at the edge of the Green Swamp

I tried to write a few minutes ago and the internet crashed due to a rain squall. The flip side of paradise.
There was a barred owl on the fencepost, quietly watching for the mice and rabbits scurrying around the yard. It is gently raining and I think of the vegetables I planted in the last few days, now drinking in the rain water that is so much better than anything we mortals can provide.
I love being here so far away from anything commercial, plastic or noisy. I do hear the trains in the distance when the vapors are right, and sometimes planes overhead.
In the suburban and urban places I have lived I loved the sound of church bells in the morning and the clinks and clanks of people getting up and moving here and there and tending to their lives.
But I love this more! I love the silence which isn't silence at all. I listen to the thousands of frogs calling at night from the ponds and the swamp. I hear the deer with their sharp whistles, the bark of the fox, the whir of the hummingbirds, the funny snorts of the wild pigs and the grunts of the armadillos. In the barn there is the tinny music of the mud daubers arguing in their shoots they have attached to the siding. I love hearing the turkeys emerging from their night roosts, and the ibis squawking in the dawn.
This is so much better than hearing the "Four Square" garbage truck that trundled its way through our suburban street.
I love the darkness at night. Depending on the phase of the moon it is sometimes so bright I can walk for miles without a flashlight. Other nights when there is cloud cover I don't even have to close my eyes for total darkness. When I turn on my flashlight I sometimes see banks of bright cow eyes low to the ground.
Though I love to be here in the Green Swamp, I do have to get my urban "fixes" from time to time so we travel every year, sometimes just to New York for a weekend, and sometimes to somewhere more ambitious such as Asia or Europe, maybe this next time to Australia.
I couldn't live here without the internet and phone, my lifeline to friends. But I am mostly accepting that these links often do go down and then I just go out and listen to the frogs and take a deep breath, so happy to be here.