September Front Porch

This is the last full month that outdoor porch sitting will be an option on a daily basis.  I am determined to make the most of it.  Happy green plants surround my tiny New England village.

The flag is a cheerful sunflower.

I come home tired most days in the first month of school and this porch is a welcome place to arrive.  That’s happy!

I’m Vaccinated and I’m Angry

I am growing weary of claims by unvaccinated people that vaccine mandates are a limit on their freedom.  Freedom is such a tricky concept and Americans are woefully ignorant of how freedom actually works when we all must live in the same society.  We wave the flag and shout the word freedom as if it gives us the right to do whatever we damn well please.  But that is not what freedom means; nor has it ever meant that.  In otherwise free societies, once human beings live with one another, freedom is necessarily bounded so that we can live safely and well alongside one another.     

All day long, your freedom is restricted.  Consider just one day in my life.  I must drive on the right side of the road because the law demands it.  Worse than that, I must follow a speed limit because safety and order for other drivers is important.  I must stop at red lights, signal before I turn, and abide by speed limits.  I’m barely out of my house 15 minutes and already my freedom has been restricted.  How do I bear it?  Well, those restrictions apply to all of us and they keep me - and you - safer as we drive our cars.     

Most limits on freedom fall into this category - restrictions made to benefit the safety of us all.  They don’t endanger my life, neither do they put me at risk.  They do set limits on what I can do - limits on my freedom.  They do that to keep me - and everyone else - just a smidge safer.  Vaccines - and masks, these days - fall into this category.  A vaccine against a potentially fatal and airborne illness helps to prevent me from contracting it.  And vaccinated people keep all the rest of us safer as well.  We have been using vaccines for years — smallpox vaccines were common in the 1700s - and we know that vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine, is safe and effective for the vast majority of us.     

There is, of course, an enormous amount of vaccine disinformation, propagated by ignorant people who are afraid.  Fear and ignorance is a potent combination and for some of us it will be deadly.  But the fear of some of us must not prevent our government (a government by the people) from taking action to protect the health and safety of all of us.  

I make it a life habit to avoid anger and hate.  They are emotions that kill joy and I want no part of them.  But my fury at the unvaccinated and the risks they create for all of us is a potent force right now.  I am not proud of it, but I find myself not giving a damn about unvaccinated people who are dying of COVID.  I don’t even care about the suffering and pain of their families at this largely preventable loss.  The willful choice of some of us to keep a pandemic alive when we could stop it is unethical, immoral, and the height of selfishness.  To claim freedom as the reason for exposing us all to a greater probability of illness and death is beyond ignorant, it’s just plain stupid.     

If you want true and absolute freedom, then go where there are no other people, in a place where your actions can never affect any of us.  That’s going to be hard to find because it is an impossible goal in a planet occupied by people.  Until then, your freedom is limited by the freedom of the rest of us.  Roll up your sleeve and get the fucking vaccine.  You’ll be safer and so will everyone else in the world.  In a world in which we must live with other people, that is a really good thing.  

School, Actual School

After nearly two weeks of meetings, actual classrooms full of real-life students arrive in the building today.  My classroom is organized; lessons are set; my first-day-school skirt and blouse are steamed and at-the-ready.

Like any start of school, there is the expectation of the unknown.  The pandemic makes this an even greater concern.  More than 80% of my students eligible to be vaccinated have had their jab.  All of the faculty and staff are vaccinated.  For now, we are not teaching hybrid and I am grateful for the chance to get to know my students before we navigate whatever madness Covid-19 brings. 

This is my 20th year teaching at my school, a landmark of sorts, and my greatest hope is for a year of healthy in-person learning.  That seems like a modest goal but if I have learned anything in the past two years of teaching, it’s that the seemingly modest goals are the most important of all.  

Giddy up, y’all.  Here we go…

New School Year, New Bulletin Board

Every year, I organize a new bulletin board for my office.  

Two parts inspiration and one part the story of my last year, each year’s board is organized to bring me daily happiness. The usual suspects are all there: UCLA; anthropomorphized British animals; books; flowers; people I love; a nod to my home state; my first celebrity crush, Smokey the Bear...and more that makes me smile).  

This year’s theme is female empowerment.  I have grown weary of being taken for granted and underestimated because of my gender.  I see being a woman as my greatest superpower and I’d advise the universe to take note and get the fuck out of my way.

The Body As Politic

When I was in the 5th grade, and 10 years old, a visit to our family pediatrician resulted in an event that lingers in my mind to this very day.  She told me that I was “too pretty to be chubby.”  What followed were a series of family diets - none able to combat the food dysfunction already well-built into our family DNA - and, for me, a growing distrust and dislike of my body.     

In the aftermath of the visit to the doctor, I remember having the feeling that what I saw in the mirror and what she saw when she looked at me were two vastly different images.  She saw a pretty face with an un-pretty body.  After that appointment, that is also what I saw.  Since then, even with the help of loads of therapy, I cannot see my body with any sense of accuracy.  For the most part, I strenuously avoid encounters with my appearance, having long ago perfected the talent of looking in a mirror but not seeing myself.     Education in feminism has ensured that I now understand the many ways that women’s bodies are a public commodity in a fashion that does not occur for men.  From hair color to the shape and style of our clothing, women’s bodies are never fully their own.  All women’s bodies - thin or not - are subject to comment and regulation in a way that never occurs for me.  The media, strangers, medical practitioners, friends, and family offer “helping” commentary that is almost never helpful and is more often cruel.  It is hard for many of us to develop any veneer of protection to these pressures.     

With the help of good therapists, I learned to tamp down anxiety about my appearance and to never present a public face that rejects limits on the right of my body to exist, to take up space.  I started this as a fake-it-’til-you-make-it strategy and, many years later, it has worked fairly well.  Movement - a run on the elliptical or a walk in the woods - and pregnancy helped me to be on friendlier terms with my body.  I no longer regard it as my enemy.  I would love to actually value and appreciate my body on a consistent basis, but that remains a work in progress.  I have always been able to value my mind, and when others have actively underestimated my intelligence, that dismissal never affected me.  You’d think I would be able to accord my body that same protection, but I have not been able to consistently do so.     

At this point, it’s been a 43 year project to value my body as I value my mind.  I know now that it’s the project of my lifetime.  This work-in-progress is vastly aided by the growing body positivity and health-at-every-size movement and I am grateful for that help, which has been essential to my continued faith in myself.  This post, a declaration of human vulnerability in a realm where I am the most protective of myself, is another step in that direction.  It’s a reminder to 10 year old me that my value as a person is inherent and not a function of anything other than my human existence.

End-of-Summer Adventure: New Jersey Botanical Garden

T and I have been visiting state parks in NJ for the past three years.  When the pandemic struck, that interest turned out to be rather keen as the outdoors was safe for these little journeys.  When we began, in December 2018, we set a goal to visit every state park in NJ.  We’re more than two-thirds complete and we happily wander here and there as the mood strikes.  Last weekend, the mood called for Ringwood.     

Set so far north that we could step into New York State, Ringwood and the New Jersey State Botanical Garden that is across the street were, as is invariably the case, unexpected gems.      

The day was cool and a bit overcast but the gardens were beautiful, blest by plenty of rain as they had been all Summer long.    

 

There is both a formal garden and an informal one.  I liked the formal best in no small measure because of the amazing lily pads to be spied as we walked along the stone sidewalks.     

The informal garden had an area with both annuals and perennials.  

This gem of a garden will be worthy of a return visit and I look forward to seeing it next Spring. That’s happy!

Climate Reality

My corner of New Jersey is about one inch above the water table on the best days and on Wednesday evening, as the remnants of Hurricane Ida washed through, we were reminded again of that fact.  This storm caused flash flood destruction everywhere and it was only by good luck and the fact that we never lost electricity that we survived largely unscathed.  For most of the night on Wednesday, our basement pump was running every three minutes, just staying ahead of the deluge.      

We’ve spent some time this weekend helping folks who weren’t as lucky as us and everywhere I look in my town is evidence of enormous water damage - wet basement items (including washers, dryers, refrigerators, furnaces, and hot water heaters) emptied onto the curbs of our town; houses moved off their foundations; ruined cars covered in the remnants of dirt that show how high the floodwaters rose.     

I vote on behalf of the planet and I believe in the Green New Deal.  So do the people around me who experienced devastation on Wednesday.  I grow weary of a nation of people who thinks it’s their right to ignore Mother Nature’s urgent call for help and I fear that the continued failure to take heed will bring even more devastation in its wake.     We cannot claim that we weren’t warned. 

Pandemic School: Year 3

Though it seems insane to write it down, this the third year I will teach school while a pandemic rages on.  The first year, 2019-2020, began as a typical school year and then shifted homeward in the last third of the year, while we all tried to flatten the curve (remember that?).     

The close of that year was filled with volumes of uncertainty about what was to come for the following year. , so much so that it seems to me that uncertainty was the theme of the 2020-2021 school year.  I joked often that it was year that featured a lot of planning of things that we would subsequently cancel.  There is a painful truth to that.  As the school year unfolded,  I taught most of it in a hybrid model, punctuated at times by being fully remote and then a close to the year that brought most of our students on campus in the month of May.  That last month felt as close to normal as anything has been since March of 2020, albeit a normal with everyone in  masks and a few students still fully remote.     

We plan for 2021-2022 to be a year of students fully on campus.  When planning for September began in earnest in in late March 2021, vaccines were briskly rolling out and every teacher and most children over 12 of my acquaintance were eager to get one, that seemed like a reasonable assumption.  Now, with the start of classes just a few days away, and the Delta variant in full command in the U.S., I worry that our plans are overly optimistic.  Even with more than 80% of those over age 12 and nearly 100% of the faculty and staff vaccinated, I’d feel better with a school-wide vaccine mandate to go with our mask mandate.  Instead, I’ll have confidence in our community, a confidence that is rooted in knowledge of the community as much as it is hope.    

I no longer believe in anything like “normal."  In fact, I think a large measure of our national divide is driven by a set of people who believed in a “normal” that privileged them at the cost of others.  I have come to see normal as a problem.  I think we need to be realistic about how we live our lives in this challenge.  But lives can be lived and we must do so.  Here's to the hope that always attends the start of a school year.  Here's also to the values of a school community that looks after one another.  In these two things I hope we find the strength to make our way forward.

Old Man Tree: September 1

I never longed for the start of Summer as much I longed for Summer this year.  The hybrid school year took its toll and when June hovered into sight I was so glad for the prospect of time off.  I took advantage of that time and the unscheduled days of the last few months has been lovely. 

Though the last school year ended on a positive note - I began to believe we might not have to wear masks forever - the rise of the Delta variant over the summer has put those hopes to rest.  New Jersey is a high vax state and we’ll all be wearing a mask at school.  I’m checking the over 12 vaccination rate in my region and my school with a slight obsessiveness (school is over 80%, so that’s hopeful) and reading every study I can find about ventilation.  In short, the pandemic and its attendant anxiety are still very much with me as the start of school is very much on the horizon.

That makes Old Man Tree, this backyard, and time outside more important than ever.  As the busy days ramp up, I am grateful for time here, with a tree that is old enough that it was here for post-WWI influenza pandemic and will surely see us through this uncertainty as well.