Bittersweet

That Bittersweet Time of Year

Leave a comment

imageIt’s a strange juxtaposition of feelings, when you’re a teacher. This is my empty classroom (all the desks have been moved downstairs to the gym for testing purposes).

It’s a strange and empty feeling, with all the students gone and the work undertaken each day composed of proctoring tests, grading, assessing completed exams, pulling together final reams of paperwork in the form of “proofs” of the work I do all year as a teacher so that I can receive my “score” (that will designate me as “effective”, “highly effective”, “developing” or really in trouble), and ordering supplies and books for next year, taking everything off the walls, straightening up files, etc etc.

I prefer the have the liveliness of teenagers (spanning ages of 14 – 18, depending on the grade I’m teaching that period) in my classroom. But at the same time, this signals a shift to the different, less harried work of summer. It’s just as demanding, only at a different pace (and with no pay, of course, LOL).

Any real writing I may get to do will take place in the next two months.

But much of that time will be spent trying to “catch up” on all the household things let go all year, carting my own teen here and there and babysitting my new granddaughter, not to mention slowly – always – getting ready for the coming new academic year in the fall, and the six new classes of students I will face each day.

So it is bittersweet to me.

I used to think I’d get used to it over time – but this year marks the completion of my 27th year of teaching, and it’s never changed. I still feel that little flutter of emptiness and that lump of memory of all the lively, engaging, sometimes upsetting but always useful moments that have happened in this space since the first day of September.

And I miss my students.

Secret Ministry of Frost

Leave a comment
frost

image courtesy of The Teacup Chronicles

On this lovely, sunny frigid day in the north country of New York State, I thought it fitting to share this poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It’s one of my very favorites from the Romantic Age, for its gorgeous imagery, moods, and textures…beginning quietly peaceful and reflective before shifting to bittersweet contemplation of memories and hopes for the future, and finally, ending with a heartfelt and lush appreciation of Nature’s majesty in all her moods and seasons.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Frost At Midnight, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
 Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud–and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
 Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

bird in snow

A Bittersweet Gift: The Dickens’ Village

6 Comments
image

A photo of my mother-in-law and her late husband is perched right above the village she created

image

The village all lit up

Last year I inherited my mother-in-law’s rather extensive “Dickens’ Village”. She built it over several decades, and some pieces need repair (like the gorgeous church, which isn’t pictured here because the steeple is broken). But it’s a beautiful collection, and my girls, when they were little, always used to love to go to grandma’s to look at it all lit up during the holidays.

It’s a little bittersweet now, to have it in our home. Her home was sold about a year ago because she suffers from Alzheimer’s. She lived with us for a summer and spent time with each of my husband’s siblings, but as she got worse, we had no choice for her own safety and well being but to move her to a constant care facility about 30 minutes from us. As of now, her disease has progressed to the point that although she usually recognizes that she knows us, when we visit, she doesn’t always know why or how, or who we are.

The village is one of the tangible reminders of what once was in our little family and can never be again.

So we will keep the village safe and put it out with love each year, in memory of all the happy times we spent together. Someday, I will pass it down to my girls, and they can keep the memories – and the remembered love – of their Grandma McCall alive and well.