Pianos in the Kitchen and Chili-tasting Tractor-racers

Just about two weeks ago my students set me lovingly straight on the fact that "Yooper" does indeed have a plainly phonetic spelling instead of my made up rendition (U-per), a spelling that is just as important as the narrow-mouthed vowelly accent they themselves have and the turn-a-statement-into-a-question-"eh" that I am struggling to keep out of my own language. But this is but one amongst many Yooper gems.

* * *

Thirty students and all three small classrooms full at Wilson Junior Academy is a good thing--and a cause for chuckling each Tuesday morning as I push the piano out of my room, and then at each lull in my busy teaching schedule throughout the day. In fact, through two closed doors and across the hallway I can hear it, even as I instruct my 5th-8th graders on how to use "muscle verbs" to strengthen their writing, even as the nine cries of "Miss Knott!" make me wish I could clone myself at least once. Through it all the fingers of our eager youngsters plink away on the keys of our piano, to the audience of a stove and a microwave and the hot lunch dishtowels and a piano teacher, all day long, all in the brilliantly acoustical kitchen. . .

* * *

Matt runs out of the men's bathroom, his eyes big. "Miss Knott," he says, his normally quiet, deep voice a little huskier than normal in his apparent distress, "I just flushed my flash drive down the toilet. It has my essay on it!" He rushes back in. The essay. The one he's worked on so hard. The one that I can't wait to read because he asked me the other day what those flowers were called with brown centers and golden petals. "Black-eyed Susans," I had told him, and then I saw him typing. Perhaps I am biased, but an essay mentioning Black-eyed Susans is bound to be a good one.

I don't know what to tell him. He actually flushed it? But a moment later he comes back out, the flash drive dangling rather lifelessly from his hand. Dare I ask? I take it home and pray over it as I put it in a little pitcher filled with white rice. . .

* * *

"This is really happening," my student says, eyebrows working up and down for emphasis, "a little kid is out in the hallway, putting something into the outlet." Thumbs point over the shoulder, and I dash out. Sure enough. There's little Sawyer--his right foot already in a tiny black walking boot after breaking his foot not long ago--innocently poking a plastic fork into the fascinating electrical crevices. . .

* * *

Hayrides. Jacob wonders what the big deal is--a ride in the cold on a bale of hay. In my mind I ask the same question. But Yoopers take them to a new level, racing their New Holland and Ford tractors up the middle, or rather, dominating the whole county road with their caged cargoes of chattering passengers. They find an old trail through the woods, or perhaps make a new one. They rumble and pitch us across the Cedar River. They weave in-between giant rolls of silage and barns amidst a manure-scented haze. And afterwards there is a chili cook-off tasting session--twenty some chilis ranging from vegan to veggie to a solitary meat stew at the far end of the table, swarms of folks with their plastic cups and spoons gathering around the pots and the cornbread and the quart of maple syrup that is soon used up.

* * *

Gailyn and Valerie tell me that they can give me some more apples to expand my carefully canned, five-quart collection of applesauce, and so I meet them at their "new house," as they call it, off in the woods on a curious leaf-strewn gravel road with a galvanized gate gaping open at the entrance. Here they are far away from their cranes and sawdust-burning stove machinery that they hope to sell off as running business someday.

They grin and wave at me as I drive in and invite me into the cute little hunting camp that they are remodeling. I didn't know that they have this other house besides the one from whose porch they throw and then hand-feed apples to the deer. They both give me a sheepish look when I ask how long they've been working on it and what they're doing. "Well," Valerie begins, "we were just going to fix up the closet, make it a walk-in. . ." She points to the corner of the camp's footprint where there is evidence of a recent struggle and the hopeful look of a bedroom and maybe something more. "But then we really didn't like the staircase--it was here," she says tracing her finger across a mark in the fireplace, right beneath the loft. "So we took it out. And then we took off the paneling on this wall, to put on the outside wall of our walk-in closet, and we discovered that the squirrels had chewed through the wall behind the paneling. So we have to take that out too. And then we looked at the wiring. . ." They chuckle good-naturedly and throw up their hands. "It's all her idea--naw," Gailyn pipes in, and looking at his wife fondly. He, on the other hand, dreams of the day when the house will be finished and he will walk outside and whistle and have the chickadees flock about him, landing on his hair and crumb-filled hands as they did when he was a boy.

* * *

"Bridge may be icy!" my seventh and eighth graders chorus to me as the wheels of the minivan I am driving begin their climb up onto the Mackinac Bridge, heading north, heading home from the lower peninsula's Camp Au Sable after several days of conference-wide company. Later when we stop at a rest area on Route 2 along lake Michigan, they pop out of the car so joyfully that a woman giggles and says we look to her like a van full of clowns. I laugh along with her as my charges run in to the bathroom. And then I race along with them down the boardwalk to the sands of the beach, all of us inhaling the smell of leaves and water and cleanliness, and there they scrawl in the water-lapped sand with a mixture of fingers and shoe-heels, "We are home!" Somehow I feel as if I want to tack an "eh" onto the end of that. I think so too.