Cassandra Colors Her Hair after the Apocalypse

Later today, I'll turn in midterm grades at Spartanburg Methodist College.  In some ways, it's amazing to me that we're already at midterm.  The weather is still somewhat summery.  I look across the mountains as I'm driving, and most of the trees are still green.

But on my daily walks, I notice that some of the trees have lost all of their leaves already.  In the area beside the road where I saw the bear back in August as I walked up to the chapel, a bear would not be hidden there today--the undergrowth has lost most of its leaves.

When I went back to my August blog posts to verify that I saw the bear in August, I saw another blog post, Cassandra Colors Her Hair.  It talked about my visit to the fancy hair salon that served wine in crystal glasses, and it mentioned a poem that came to me at the hair salon.  I wondered if I ever wrote it.

I went to my rough draft file, and I don't think I ever did.  I decided to give it a go.  My blog post talked about the poem arriving in full in my head, but it's no longer there.  Happily, my blog post gave some details about what I planned to write:  "It will contrast her past life, when she went to salons that served wine along dreams about what a hair cut and color could give us, with a current life in the midst of a climate crisis--or will it be post apocalypse? I have a vision of Cassandra who knows how to use plants to coax life from a womb or end it, to use plants to stave off infection, to poison or to cure. But for the most part, she uses her vast garden (and the nature preserve beyond her property) to color cloth and to dye her hair."

I decided to paint the poem with apocalyptic tones.  Here's how it begins:

I uncork the last bottle of white wine,
an extravagance I may regret later if I need
to disinfect, if I need to forget.

The poem came easily.  I had that uneasy feeling that back in August, I had an idea for an even better poem.  I shrugged off that feeling and kept writing.  I've ended up with a decent poem--but is it finished?  I'll keep the document open and see.

I'm also thinking of my poetry process these days.  Once I wrote poems longhand on purple legal pads, but these days, I open a document on the computer, and I toggle back and forth.  I'm getting more written that way.  It's not as easy to go back to rough drafts and leaf through them, the way it is in a legal pad.

I am so happy that I wrote a poem.  It's been weeks of writing a few lines and then sputtering.  And in the spirit of appreciation for August Kristin who left me poem notes, let me write down an idea for another poem I had as I drove back from Lutheranch, back across Georgia on Sunday.

I thought about what and who had previously been on the land, about Harriet Tubman leading slaves to safety.  I thought about dark skies and scars and reading the stars, a map to freedom, stars that scar the black back of the sky.  I thought about all the people we cannot save, no matter how hard we try.  I thought about writing about Harriet Tubman when she's old and cannot save people anymore, but is that valid?  I realized I don't know much about Harriet Tubman when she's old.  I thought about Harriet Tubman and the Stono River and her spywork during the Civil War.

This blog post has gone in an unexpected direction.  I sat down feeling a bit grumpy because I thought I didn't have much to say.  And now, I have not only a blog post but a new poem--hurrah!

Apples and the Composition Process

I meant to write about Thursday's classes sooner than today--so let me get some details down, while I still remember.  I knew that I wanted to do something with apples in class, but did I want to do a whole mini-festival?  Something with pumpkin bread and apples and candy corn?  In the end, I decided to just go with apples.  

I bought a bushel because I wanted to have enough to feel like students could take more than 1 apple.  I wanted apples left over for my household.  I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to use apples in class, but I knew I wanted it to lead a daily writing, and perhaps more.

Could I develop something that I used in both my first year Literature and first year Composition classes?  Of course I could!

In both classes, we read "Summer Apples" by Cathryn Essinger.  We talked about the startling way the poem starts, those stunning first 2 lines, and we worked our way through the poem to the ending that is so perfect.  We talked about memory and aging and the potential in seeds.  

For my Lit class, I started by having them talk about their personal history with both apples and other fruits.  I asked where we saw apples in literature, and we talked about the Garden of Eden and Snow White.  And yes, there are plenty of other apple possibilities, but we just talked about those two.  I asked if they could conceive of a piece of literature--a poem or a song or a piece of fiction, where the apple in the Garden of Eden or Snow White's apple had a voice and a perspective.  For my Composition class, we went to the next part of the exercise.

For both classes, I asked questions that I hoped would lead to a different way of seeing.  What color is this apple?  Green.  All green.  Some brown.  Describe the color of green.  Now describe it by a comparison:  The green of this apple is like the new grass of spring, not the dying grass of late September.  Now try for something more unusual:  The green of this apple is like the color of my true love's eyes, soaked from crying because I'm leaving one last time.

I asked them to listen to the apple.  What did they hear?  What does this apple have to say if it had a voice?

If they wanted to, I had them taste the apple.  What does it taste like?  What kind of sweetness/tartness?  What is that like?

We did the same thing with the other senses, and then I had them write.  I asked them to write half a page or more that would give me something evocative about apples.  They had lots of choices--a poem perhaps, something in the voice of an apple or the apple standing for something else.

I think it worked well.  In the Composition class, one student exclaimed, "I love this class!"  I don't think she was doing it to ingratiate herself to me.  

My Lit class is a bit harder.  About 8 of the 24 students are routinely involved.  Many of the others just sit and try to resist the lure of their phones--with varying degrees of success.  Occasionally, one or two engage, but often not.  They're not hostile, exactly, but they are more vacant than I would like.

I continue on in the hope that maybe their engagement looks different.  Or maybe my class offers some other kind of benefit, even if they're not engaged in the way I would like.  Even if it's just a respite, that would be fine too.

Bread Making Process for Large Groups

Last night I had a classic anxiety dream--I was in a class, and something was due, but I thought it was due the following week.  I woke up and made a list in my head to make sure I'm not missing something.  I'm still feeling anxious this morning, even though I haven't missed anything.

I am in that time of the term where I'm thinking of all the balls I'm juggling and trying not to think about it.  If I just keep going, I'm less likely to drop a ball.  If I look down, I may drop all the balls.  So, in an effort to calm my jittery self, let me reflect a bit on bread baking with a huge group of easily distracted middle school confirmands.  I accidentally created a successful approach that I want to remember.

I wanted to talk about yeast and bread in general, but I also wanted to make quick breads for our Communion bread.  So I decided to do both.  The first thing we did as a group was to look at yeast.  I walked in front of each child and held out a spoonful, commenting on the small grains.  

Then I sprinkled 5 spoonfuls in a bowl of water and showed the bowl to each person.  I commented on how it looked like lake water with algae in it.  I set it aside.

I had the bread making supplies on two tables, and my vision was that one group would make quick bread with regular flour and one would make it with gluten free flour.  

That part of the process went fairly well.  Each table had 8-10 children, and we dumped the ingredients in the big bowl, stirred and stirred, and then made the dough into rounds.  

At a certain point, restlessness happened, so I had everyone line up against the back wall to look at the bowl of yeast and water.  It was bubbly, and we talked about what yeast does, and why Jesus had the parable about the yeast.  What does it mean to be leaven in the loaf?  Why does Jesus call himself bread?  We talked about how lots of people have sustained themselves with not much else but bread.  We talked about the other types of food we know that ancient people ate, olives and lamb and small birds.  Bread is much more affordable and sustainable.

We came back to the table to finish up the quick bread and to add ingredients to the yeast bread bowl.  We added oil and honey, along with milk and more flour.   The confirmands had a chance to mix and knead with their hands (not required, since I know not everyone likes to get their hands messy).  The first group even got a ball of dough to shape.

 

The first group, a smaller group, did a good job of sharing the tasks, but the larger group was not skilled that way.  So I changed course.   I had everyone line up to take a turn at the bowl.  I said, "Mix, mix, move aside."  So everyone stirred 3-6 times and stepped aside.  Every so often, I dumped some flour or milk in the bowl.  I did the same thing with kneading.  The quick pace kept people focused.  They seemed to have fun, but more important, everyone got a chance to participate.

I didn't give the second group a chance to shape their own ball of dough.  They needed to get cleaned up and back to the main group.  But I also didn't want to risk what might happen if they had much more than a quick encounter with the dough:  dough in hair, dough flung across the room, not enough dough for bread to bake.  Once the confirmands went back to the main group, I washed my hands and took the trays in to the large group.

I said, "Look how much your bread dough has risen in the last half hour.  This is what it means to be leaven in the loaf.  This is your task, to be leaven in the loaf of your community."  I said it in my loud booming voice, and it got everyone's attention.

Then I went back and finished shaping the loaves and watching over the baking of them.  The kitchen staff and some of the grown ups helped me clean up.  

Once the bread cooled, I decided it was wise to slice the loaves in advance.  We were giving people a chance to taste the breads with their dinner, and I didn't want everyone waiting while I sliced bread.

I was pleased that everyone had a chance to try whichever kinds of bread they wanted and even to come back for seconds.  

It was very neat to worship the next day with the bread that we had created as part of communion.  I didn't have a chance to see if the confirmands found it as moving as I did.  

What I'd really like to be able to do is to check with them in 20 years to see if they remember, or who remembers what.  But most of us don't get to do that.  We do the work and we hope that some of it takes.

Confirmation Camp Overview

Tomorrow I will write in more detail about the bread baking at Confirmation Camp yesterday.  Last night I made this Facebook post which gives an overview of a more in-depth piece of writing that will come in the future:  "At some point, I'll write more and include pictures, but let me just say that out of the chaos of baking with 44 middle school confirmands came amazing bread: yeasted and quick breads, gluten free and wheat flour breads. We talked about what it means to be the leaven in the loaf, and then we ate our loaves. We talked about how God is forgiving, just like the process of bread baking, and then we made huge batches of bread without a recipe. It was amazing."

It's amazing to think that my total time with the confirmands creating bread dough was only an hour:  roughly half an hour with each group of 22.  Here I am with a pan of their dough that had risen, and I reminded the whole group what we had talked about, what it means to be yeast, how something tiny can bubble up into something that will nourish a whole community.

But there were other memorable moments too.  I led a group on a labyrinth walk.  Lutheranch has the most unusual labyrinth I've ever seen:  instead of clearing out trees to make the labyrinth, the labyrinth winds around the trees.  To get to it, you walk up a little trail.  It felt completely remote, yet we could hear the group of confirmands who had gone swimming in the lake and a cow at a nearby farm.  It was wonderful.

I also want to remember how many people were enthusiastic about art.  I'm sure that some of them were sketching and doodling out of boredom.  I pulled out my sketchbook during the morning baptism large group session, not out of boredom but as a way to stay focused.  One of the girls asked me about my sketching at break, and I offered to share supplies.  I showed her various markers and gave her a blank page out of my sketchbook.  Her grandmother was one of the adults there, and she thanked me for taking time with her granddaughter, but it was a great experience for me too.

The meals have been good, and I have been surprised at how much food middle schoolers consume.  We had fresh fruit at breakfast yesterday, and it was all gone by the time I walked through the serving line at the end.  I'm not complaining, mind you.  But I'm almost sure that my generation, when we were younger, would have walked right by that fruit.

Of course, we wouldn't have had the same wonderful mix of fruit.  I don't think I tasted fresh pineapple until late in my college years, if then.

The moon is full, and there's not really a great set up for writing in this room.  Let me go out and enjoy the view of it one last time, in this rural Georgia setting.

A Writing Process to Lead to More Delight

On Tuesday this week, I took an essay written by Ross Gay in The Book of Delights.  It was a four paragraph essay about a flower growing in the space where the curb meets the sidewalk (or was it the street?).  I also copied the preface to the book so that students could have insight to his writing process, as described in this interview:  "For his most recent work, The Book of Delights, the Indiana University professor assigned himself a simple task: He would compose an essay each day about something he found delightful. It didn’t have to be big. It didn’t have to be profound. Just something that caught his fancy."

In that interview, Gay describes the process this way:  

"This last book of essays, I gave myself the task to write a short essay every day for a year about something that delighted me, that’s kind of what the book is. I had a task, and the task was to take 30 minutes to draft the essay. It wasn’t like “20 minutes at night every night,” I would get it in whatever time. That was the most regimented I’ve been for a while. I was usually kind of feeling around for it [the object of delight].

But usually it’s thinking, reading, studying, trying to find something that turns you on and going for a bit. I’ve been lucky to kind of ride it for some days. It might get quiet for a bit, so I’ll think and try to wake it up."

When I brought the essay and the preface to my English 102 class (Composition II), we talked about this process, or rather, I talked.  I talked about how we value what we give our attention to, and if we focus on a lot of negative input, it can affect our mood.  I asked how they thought a person's life or mood might change if they wrote about 1 thing that gave them delight each day, if they adopted that as a practice.

I said that I wasn't going to require that they do this, and this term, I'm not.  But I am thinking of it as an experiment for next semester's classes.  I would do it at the beginning of the term, as a warm up to the class, as a way of getting our writing muscles used to moving again after a long break between terms.  I'm teaching English 101, the standard first year Composition class, so I'll make connections to the rest of the work we will be doing.

It's one of my unexpected delights of this term, finding inspirations for next term.  And it's one of the benefits of having so much control over my own classes.  I can try this idea and see what happens.

Thinking about the Roman Empire

In the future, we may have forgotten how various social platforms spent a significant amount of time analyzing how often men think about the Roman empire, how shocked some of us have been to find out how many men think about the Roman empire daily.

And then there was the question of what kind of men:  what race, what economic class, what nationality?  In a recent episode, the NPR show 1A covered this Roman empire phenomena in a way that was intriguing, funny, and full of insight.

As to the question of how often men think about the Roman empire, over on Twitter, poet Alicia E. Stallings wrote, "Women think about the Iliad about once a day."  

I replied, "Or is it the Odyssey? I think of Penelope, weaving and unweaving, of the men making their way home, of us all, stuck in so many ways, dreaming of something else."

This idea that men think about the Roman empire once a day made me think about what we think about when we're barely conscious of thinking at all.  I thought of James Joyce, trying to capture the elusive nature of our internal monologue, how mundane those monologues can be, how they point us to what we really value.

A Trip to the Apple Orchard and the Pumpkin Patch

I had many reasons for wanting to go to my favorite apple orchard yesterday, but the main one was the fear that if I didn't go soon, I might miss the season entirely.  I'm also doing something out of the ordinary with my students today, and apples will make the class a bit more festive (more details later).

I went to my favorite apple orchard, Coston's in Hendersonville, NC, where I've gone many times.  My phone took me a different route, through twisty back roads, past farms and fields of flowers (such tall sunflowers!) and late season corn.  I decided to stop at the pumpkin patch that's beside Coston's first--pumpkins first, then apples.

Much to my surprise, the pumpkin I got the other day at the grocery store cost less than the same size pumpkin at the patch.  Happily, there were others, and now I have a pumpkin up at the road by my mailbox.  

The apple orchard has delightful displays, which change from year to year.  This year featured tractors.

While I looked around the store at the pumpkin patch (every patch and orchard has a store now, it seems, a store that sells all kinds of stuff), I saw this box of tomatoes--$12 for the whole box, which is quite a deal, considering that the other tomatoes were $3 a pound and higher.  So in addition to the bushel of apples that I bought later, I also brought home roughly 25 pounds of tomatoes.

I bought a bushel of apples because it was so much cheaper, and apples will keep.  But when I got home, I thought, hmm, maybe I bought too many apples.  So I wrote to some of my neighbors and went out to share my apple bounty with others.  This morning I added a chopped apple to my oatmeal--delightful!