Joy

So happy that Eliza's here. On Friday I helped move some classroom equipment--mini-trampolines and therapy mats and bouncy ball chairs--to another school for a summer school classroom. It was a long day. Special Ed. Summer School (aka Extended School Year) was supposed to have been planned by a now former employee who has what I like to call the "Sadim" touch (opposite of Midas, see). It was actually less ready to go than if I had just left it alone. So we pulled it together last week. There were angry and frustrated teachers, teaching assistants, and parents because the planning and messaging had been so contradictory and chaotic.

So I offered to move equipment with my mini-van.

As I was making a trip into the new school with arms full of legos and an area rug printed with cars and trains I saw a sign in the school garden: Let nature be your teacher. William Wordsworth. I stopped in my tracks.

Wordsworth. Nature. In the back lot of an elementary school on Aurora Boulevard in downtown Seattle. Hot hazy sun--me in heels and a skirt, arms full of grubby classroom props. Twenty four years ago I went to the Lake District to a Wordsworth retreat, where I climbed Mount Helvellyn and swam in Grasmere Lake and listened to academic papers about Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and all of British Romanticism.

And here I am with a broke-down mini-van in a hot, damp city, so far from Grasmere Lake but nature, oh nature, she is teaching me. Babies are born and we love and hope for all the gifts of the world for them, but they don't talk by the time they should. Maybe they never will. Or they have no optic nerves. Or limbs. Or they can't stand the touch of their mother's hand.

But we build schools and teach them to play and touch and perhaps talk. We plant sad city gardens with tile mosaics, small clay hand prints, lazy bees buzz and carry life from lavender to beets and wild blackberries. Wordsworth said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility, or the memory of golden daffodils that flashes upon the inward eye. Nature is the garden on Aurora, the grubby therapy ball, the tired teacher, the summer session of school.