These Beautiful Days

Once in a blue moon I have an entire day just for me, something I so craved in the time before I retired. I have just finished two quilts and readied them for the 'long-armed quilting lady'. She and I will decide about what quilting design, what thread colors, and I will leave these off at her house, confident that they will be perfect and ready for binding in a few weeks. It was like a bolt of magic when I discovered that I did not have to quilt everything on my sewing machine- an arduous and not very creative endeavor. Nor, did I have to quilt everything by hand. So, these two are off to be quilted with the top and the insides of the batting and the bottom layer. So cool!

I love the process of garnering the fabrics, adjusting the overall idea, and putting it all together - and then changing it! Because I always make quilts for specific people, I love thinking hard about them all the while I work.

So, my day today was my own, in a clean studio, looking forward to my Tai Chi class in the evening.

I am still so in love with this beautiful place where I live.With every pivot you see a beautiful and lush view. I enjoy all the gardens we have planted and nurtured over the years. It takes an enormous amount of work but it is worth it. I find that I cannot be in the vegetable garden long before I am melting in the heat. But then I look out into the pasture and see four deer, and I am surrounded by butterflies and hummingbirds. Even the cows, who annoy me, have that sweet breath and their legs all together are wonderful art.

Here is a broadside I carved and printed many years ago, and I still like it. This is Walt Whitman, a magnificent American poet. Even more than it did then, so many years ago when I was making woodcuts, it seems relevant to my life now.

Our cows are still out there in front of the studio trying to eat the zinnias and generally being bad and leaving meadow muffins in the road. 

But they are part of the life force, along with the almost deafening frog calls, the raccoons we trap and release, the clever squirrels who always defeat us when we put up bird feeders, the dozens of hummingbirds who swoop and buzz around our six nectar feeders.

I love the black racer snakes who are so domestically inclined and lounge around the buildings here in their office hours between ten and four. I love the mud wasps who make such intricate dwellings everywhere on the sides of buildings and I admire the persistence of wrens who nest in such improbable places.

Most of all, I love the many wild flowers in my purview.

As Walt Whitman said, I am staggered. I am staggered by the sheer enormity and magnificence of it all here in our home in the Green Swamp.

The Sweetness of Life

We have been through a period of stressful times, so I was glad to have our nine year old grandson come for a visit. He hadn't been here for a month, and I was eager to see him.

Since the close of school he has been on a road trip with his parents to visit in-laws, friends and relatives. So, he was fresh with reports of his visits to Washington and New York and all the folks he had seen. He is really looking forward to going to camp for three weeks.

But he clearly loves his visits here with his own room and Legos and books. He is nine, and a tall sting bean of a kid. His face is round and dimpled with a thatch of red hair, the kind of face you'd love to look at forever.

This evening, after a pizza dinner he made with his grandfather, we went swimming in the night that was still dripping from the rainy season thunderstorms. "Oh, let's just skinny dip", he said. So we are swimming about under the moon, talking about this and that, just companions.

I wonder what memories this child will have about visits to his grandparents? I hope they will be as sweet as mine have been with my grandmother.

Later, after we had dried off, we ate peaches just picked from a neighbor's tree, and topped with vanilla ice cream. While we ate this ambrosia, he read me a Shel Silverstein poem he very much liked, and then I read him a story about my father that I had written just for him. This feeling between us was just so sweet.  He went up to brush his teeth and in a few minutes I followed to tuck him in and kiss him many times and tell him how much I love him. I turn off the lights and start down the stairs and he calls out, "I love you!"

Life is sweet, indeed. Tomorrow we have many plans! He has collected all the change that has accumulated here for several months, counted it, and is prepared to take it to put into his bank account at the local credit union. ( $29! At this rate he'll be able to buy a car when he's sixteen!) We'll go to the library and get tons of books. And we will look for some Star Wars videos.

There is so much to do! This boy is never at loose ends requiring a person to entertain him. But I always want to extend his inquiries, be inviting, and be the crazy creative grandma.

Other grandchildren have been just as sweet. I am thinking about the oldest who is about to have his 21st birthday, and is the first under my heart.

Will the Common Core Standards work, or is it just the Next Panacea?

At first, I was quite enthusiastic about this new deal in the education of American students. Yes, let's hold students to new high standards, no child left behind, every high school graduate able to read and calculate percentages! And so much more! All American students will be the same because they'll all know the same stuff! They'll be able to go to college and not have to take remedial writing and reading and math, or they will be employment ready with the nimbleness and flexibility and deep knowledge our global economy demands.

We are not French or German or Swedish, though a little bit of all of those and hundreds of others. This country is deeply different, I believe. There is no such thing in the United States as homogeneity. We came from everywhere and we are still coming. We come in all colors and we speak many languages and we have many treasured traditions from family roots. We want to be a country where we are all proud, all kids are above average, and we cling to the idea that our opportunities are endless (if we work hard). And we prize our individuality.

American public education has been key in the growth of this nation. Public schools, for all their warts, have through the generations, been the glue of an over arching American culture. So many Americans learned our common language, English, in our public schools.

Throughout all the many newest greatest attempts to make our education system better, what remains are the dailiness of a kid's school experiences. A child learns the structure of the school culture: get there on time, follow the rules, watch the clock, look forward to recess, worry about tests, and maybe there will be something truly interesting or fun happening.

With this Common Core initiative, I worry, again, that this is another way of demoting teachers to being slaves of a money driven system coming down from educational publishing giants, pushed by politicians and lobbyists.

I have studied the Common Core objectives. It's all about cogent reasoning, evidence collection, specificity, commutative properties and other edu-speak crap. All of it is good stuff, actually. But in a real situation, why not produce a Shakespearean play? Why not develop an orchestra? Why not have animals in the classroom? Why not run a school store? Why not read great books out loud to students so that they would come to love literature? Why not let kids write rap music? Why not have the kids do real banking? Why not have as many kids as possible learn coding? Why not have kids cooking?

Remember 'New Math'? Moms and Dads in kitchens across America struggled with this and tried hard. "Why can't junior just learn the multiplication tables?  And why is your math written horizontally?"  That panacea was scrapped.

We really are all different, and perhaps we should celebrate that. I envision schools that have unique footprints. A principal could gather his/her staff considering the talents and skills needed. Science? Imagine an inviting huge science room filled with interesting stuff, animals, computers for data collection. Imagine an art room filled with every imaginable material, beautiful paper, potters wheels, printmaking. Imagine a writing center where kids write their own magazines and newspapers, develop websites and apps.
Imagine literature that is not boring and 'rigorous', dance that is joyous, music that fills the rooms, math that is so fascinating a kid will voluntarily spend all night on a hard puzzle. I occasionally read about such programs.

I do believe that if we unfettered our teachers from these test driven curricula, they would fly!
Seems that we are glommed onto Common Core. I will be into "evidence collection". As a major school time volunteer I will keep watch.

Fashion Grandma- this may alarm you!

O.K. Folks,  I am going to give it to you straight about getting elderly/fashion.
To begin with, I always loved my work for many reasons, and one of them was that I never had to "dress for success". As a teacher in a funky and wonderful private school, our uniform was jeans and shorts, It was hot and we had to be on the floor with kids and be prepared at any moment to go out and watch birds or cast seine nets in the Gulf of Mexico. We needed to squat in the dust to observe ant lions.

On some occasions, of course, we teachers had to dust off the heels and find a dress, but that was rare.

So, now, retired grandma that I am, I look back with horror at the many ceremonial things I did with my spouse, sartorially speaking. We went to many countries and were required to dress for appointments and banquets with the powerful and rich.

This was ultimately very fascinating, but there was always the undercurrent of "what will I wear?"
Inevitably, there would always be some women on the trips who brought their own hairdressers! Yikes!  How to tame my curly hair?

Those day of fashion anxiety are over, thank god.

So, here I am, seventy-three years old, and still! I sometimes worry about the fashion issues. I am doing as a volunteer pretty much what I did before I retired. So, when I appear at my school I am wearing my regular uniform of shorts or jeans. (I need to be able to sweat in the school garden!)
I see some of the teachers there in high heels and tight skirts and wonder how they manage.
So, still, I am left in the dust!

The third toe on my right foot is bleeding because I cut the toenail too short. My fingernails are permanently embedded with garden grit. All my skin, wrinkled as it is, is too brown from the sun.
I read the New York Times Style section and find out about the latest things for beauty, and of course I want to be beautiful too. I am not sure I am up for spending $5000 on wrinkle removal or liposuction or whatever.

My major beauty routine is scrubbing my feet under the outdoor shower several times a day.
For the last several years I have thought that I would do better to wear elbow length tee shirts to cover as much of my wrinkly arms as possible and still be able to function.
No more! I am fit and trim, no baggy under arms, tight thighs. So I am wrinkled and it is my right at my age.

I stride forth to my Tai Chi class with bare toes and tank top and I am confident. It's not about pedicures and the perfect toned skin.

Still, I have such admiration for many women my age who seem so confident in their style.
It's the beginning of summer, so I went out and bought three new pairs of shorts that will last a couple of seasons.  Those, and the new plain black bamboo dress, will take me through just about anything.