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.

A Reaper Resting

O there'll be Joy when the work is done,
Joy when the reapers gather home,
Bringing the sheaves at set of sun
To the new Jerusalem,

Joy, joy, there'll be joy by and by
Joy, joy where the joys never die
Joy, joy for the day draweth nigh
When the workers gather home.


Grandma Madeline LaClair
5.3.1928 - 7.12.2011

On Thinking about Things and Moving and Inspired by the Thoughts of Thoreau...

"Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual:--'the evil that men do lives after them.'--As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden ("Economy," 54)

Well-spoken. But what now?

Some might argue that I am young and that it is not too late.

Young? How?

Do you not know that I bear the ancient genes of frugal New Englanders in every digital hair and attached earlobe of my body, that I carry the generations-old, thrifty, conscientious whispers of "you might just need that later... better hang on to it," in my already well-entrenched cogitation pathways, that a book by one of my favorite essayists sits in the room next to my own, titled String to Short to Be Saved, and tells the story of a box with just such a label found in one of Thoreau's "dust hole" type attics... with just such hapless string particles inside?

I have never liked yard sales all that much, but that does not make me any more of a hope case. I simply cannot bring myself to go that public and especially anytime the word "rummage" appears on signs I feel the guilty need to bolt around the nearest corner. But you have not seen me furtively creeping along the wall out of my dormitory room to the unofficially titled "free tables" in the upstairs lobbies, nose twitching, beady eyes darting, ready to sidle nonchalantly past with only a glance if the door should open, ready to run back to my nest, rat-tail trailing behind me, if suspicion should arise, but eager to just see what's on that table. It might be something useful.

I do wonder what dried tapeworms I have collecting dust in the crannies of my room... But I fear a greater problem. What about the carefully dessicated giraffes that will crumple even the loaded bumper of my toy truck?

And I will dismiss the first solution that comes to mind as impossible: Perhaps those giraffes would be happier staying with my parents in Vermont. No! Even there the frequent rain would cause their exponential and hydrated growth into complete giants, not merely dried ones.

Toting Expansions

My veterinarian sister left for her New Zealand job on Thursday, all of her worldly possessions crammed and weighed and prayed into six oddly-bulging bundles--bike box, ski bag, ginormous hockey satchel, suitcase, backpack, duffle. We helped her haul her pile through check-in, and then watched her from behind the thick layer of security glass in Burlington, VT as she removed her shoes and took her laptop out of the well-loved backpack and flashed us a final grin. If the ashcloud over Chile lets her, she will fly with her relatively small mound from Los Angeles to far across the gray sea on the morrow.

Now I look out the window at the little white Toyota she left behind. I don't think that I could fit my entire life into six bundles anymore--let alone into either (or both!) of the two tiny Geos that have each taken their bows out of my life in the past several weeks. That's why I have Sammy, sturdy yet as ever, and minus only my sister's beloved collection of bumper stickers stating such enlightening tidbits as "Coffee: It Makes You Poop." (That one in particular seemed especially loyal to my sister with it's tenacious glue, but the determined teacher in me prevailed.)

In three weeks or so Sammy will help me move out to U-per land as he has faithfully served my sister for ten years--New Hampshire to Michigan to Vermont to Colorado--this time with a bed set in the back and a signature pair of green crocs on the dash. In southwestern Michigan we will add to our entourage a calico named Amie--who adopted me--and such cumbersome delights as a cello and an oboe and "several" unfortunately-shaped boxes. We'll buy the dishsoap once we reach Sam Campbell land--that is, if they use such things up there.

Yet again I long for the sleek-shelled simplicity of being a turtle.

Another One of Those Things...

In my child's mind I used to think that Geo Metros were the ugliest cars, rolling around as they did with their silly bubbled bodies and impish pointed noses. And besides, everyone else in my family had trucks--practical vehicles good for the growing woodpile and pulling horse-trailers and some semlance of self-esteem...

*Proud Geo owner, 2007-2011

My father is a teacher. He is a good one, and I used to "know" that I was not. As a college freshman, studying English was as close to education as you were going to get me. Okay, if I had to, I would add secondary education as a minor... and maybe Teaching English as a Second Language would be surviveable... but never, ever ask me to teach the little ones!

*Excited beginning teacher, 2011-

Serving in a foreign mission field? That was for those who had a passion for it! And that did not include me. Wasn't there enough work to do in the home country?

*Student missionary, spring 2010

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Colporteuring. For years I've hid behind a flimsy excuse of shyness and awkwardness and a lack of the ability to be pushy, the claim of wanting to witness in a less shocking manner, and if all else failed, the stubborn laugh and the "I just don't do that." It seems I might have learned from previous experiences that such locked and barricaded rooms in our mental hallways are the delightful challenge of the Master Lock-picker...

After merely a three days of personal experience, I could tell you about the Surabian, non-Christian man with olive skin and dark curly hair whose eyes were magnetized to the cover of the Great Controversy. "I am fascinated by this title," he told me, his fingers reaching out for the book.

I could show you the two highschool girls I almost walked away from, their young eyes sparkling over the healthful cookbook and Man of Peace, an adaptation of Desire of Ages.

I could have you listen to the retired theology professor from Michigan State University, politely disagreeing with the divinity and second coming of Christ, with the books I carried, with the faith and beliefs I held. I could have you hear his wife scold him into giving me a donation, and see him give an amount such that I could press a book into his hand. "Please sir, I want you to have this."

I could share with you an inner peace and joy I've found only when allowing God to break down my barriers and work through my inexperience, prejudice, and weakness to show His mighty power and glory.