Having been overseas for the last three autumns, I have reveled in every shopping trip that has taken me by a seasonal display. Even back in August, I turned a corner in the store and grinned at the rows of fake pumpkins stretching down the aisle, reassured by the seasonal decorations that I was truly back in America. In the grocery stores, I nod approval as I pass by seasonal displays of “fall” foods and occasionally drop a seasonal treat like a Reese’s pumpkin into my shopping basket. (Logically, I know that Reese’s pumpkins are the same as Reese’s cups, but illogically, I believe they taste better.)
And now in October - the epitome of autumn, I find walking a far safer mode of transportation for me as my eyes are drawn to the yellow and orange stands of trees lining the freeway or a spray of red leaves in the middle of clump of green. One morning, with the fog still sleepily clinging to the fields, a blip of orange off to the right snagged my mind as I sped by. A half a mile later, my mind realized what I had seen as I blurted out, “Pumpkins!” like an excited seasonal greeting. Only my sense of duty (okay, fine, and my sub par driving skills) kept me driving on to school instead of backtracking to visit a sleepy pumpkin patch. I know that small, woodland creatures exist year-round, but as I walk through the park’s bike trails, I feel as though each bunny, mouse, chipmunk, and chickadee I see is another example of October’s wonder. And after three years of seeing no other animals except for ubiquitous magpies, I consider spotting even a squirrel as proof that October is amazing. (After my instinctive Doug-like reaction of “Squirrel!” I remind myself that squirrels are normal in North America and that the other people enjoying the path didn’t hear my internal excitement so I won’t go down in their histories as “the weird bike-path squirrel lady.”) The last three years, spring has been indescribably beautiful with the lazy cherry blossom “snow” that drifts down with each puff of wind and lines the streets. A part of me felt disloyal to autumn as I reveled in those displays of spring’s beauty. But this week, I got to experience the autumn equivalent to that. A blustering wind kicked up as I was leaving school Friday, and the yellow birch leaves lining the road fluttered down in an autumnal flurry that rivaled any cherry blossom snowfall. I’m not sure which of L. M. Montgomery’s characters said, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” Even if it were the insufferable Josie Pye, I’d still heartily amen that sentiment. And this year, I’m so glad I live in a region where Octobers are a wonder.
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Whenever I go to the beach, a part of me is aware that I’m visiting a mermaid graveyard. Perhaps it’s been a while since you read the original little sea-maid story and have forgotten that the sea people dissolve into sea foam when they die. The little mermaid’s dream of becoming human started long before saving the human prince—it began when her grandmother told her the merpeople’s fate. Her dream to become human was really longing to have a soul.
Naturally, whenever I wade at the beach with new friends, I remind them that the sea foam rushing around our feet is former sea maids. But there is another part to that story that I frequently think of too, not at the beach, but in the sky. I usually fly alone so I’ll share it with you since my seatmates don’t know me and might think me odd if I blurt out wild fancies about sea-maids. At the end of the story, the sea-maid cannot bring herself to kill the prince to restore herself to her sea-maid form. Instead, as the sun rises, sealing her fate, she plunges the knife into her own heart and dissolves, not into sea foam, but into a cloud, a spirit of the air. As we fly through the clouds today, I imagine what the cloud-maid’s new world must be like. The ever-changing terrain yet steady air currents might remind her of her lost home in the sea. The different strata seem incongruous to a land-maid like me. In a middle level, the rolling cloud fields rise into towering mountains with cloud castles no less grand than the sea-king’s. But in an upper layer, I see growing darkness with cloud armies amassing on either side of a chasm of gray, not yet fighting but waiting for the first flash of lightning to let loose their volleys of thunder. Yet, below them, a herd of cloud sheep play in a bucolic field, their shepherds too well hidden for my land-maid’s eyes to distinguish from the herd. The tiered terrain must seem less strange to a former sea-maid who was used to things living above and below her. How odd she must have found the terrestrial world with one plane of existence and such weighty gravity. As she glides through the air, does she feel as though she were swimming again? The story tells us that every thousand years one spirit of the air has the chance to become human. The little sea-maid has been a cloud-maid for a couple hundred years now. Perhaps she has a new dream. Or perhaps the fog at night is the once sea-maid creeping down from her lofty home to explore once again the terrestrial world she dreams of. The other day I was sitting by the lake ostensibly doing my homework, but eventually, I had to admit that for the past half hour all I had done was watch a family of ducks swim. Their splashing into the water had first snagged my attention away from my papers; the tranquility of watching them glide through the water or wriggle in delight as they splashed themselves allowed my tied brain the break it needed from analyzing ideas and parsing language.
And then it happened: Epiphany struck me with an object lesson. The duck family had reached the other end of the lake and were lurching their way out of the water and up the steep bank. Naturally, the parent ducks led the way and lingered by the edge while the baby ducks struggled after them. The last duck, probably the youngest, had the hardest time. Just when I thought that he was going to succeed, he plopped backward and landed tail-first in the water. And I thought, “Oh, how cute!” And then, I wondered why I didn’t think that about the mistakes my students were making on their papers that were sitting forgotten beside me on the bench. When baby animals and baby humans struggle through growth, we think it’s adorable and share those moments with each other. But when my students make mistakes, my initial response is not, “Oh, how sweet! They tried so hard.” I do not post their papers on the fridge as though they were little handprint turkey paintings (which I have never seen a need for). But, that baby duck did not deliberately ignore his parents’ leading and jump into the water. No, he needed more practice and probably more muscle to be able to succeed. His failure revealed what he still lacked. His failure wasn’t permanent. Then next time I watched the duck family, I was disappointed with how adept they all were at waddling and swimming. Not one cute mishap. Years ago one of my professors had urged me to examine the logic of my students’ mistakes because their mistakes were rooted in attempts to succeed. (Yes, sometimes their mistakes stem from laziness and inattention—I do not deny that.) I understood her point and have seen how logical many of those mistakes really are. But noticing my reaction to a baby duck highlighted my professor’s point: my students are still growing, still struggling to grasp new ideas, still practicing concepts they barely understand. They might not succeed every time, but their mistakes show that they are trying. Spring fever calls me to deep clean—to purge my apartment of clutter, to tackle some of the projects that have been on my to-do list since last spring. So naturally I decided to start a whole new project: organize my photo albums, which naturally has led me cringing and laughing down memory lane.
One of the memories I had mercifully forgotten was my dreadful science elective my senior year of college. I was so focused on studying for scary PRAXIS II exam and getting ready for my student teaching that I felt a little irritated at spending my time birdwatching and leaf-collecting for an elective that didn’t connect to my field of study. Each Saturday for a month, I walked down to the river-walk to watch ducks and write in my field journal. Usually my friend (also named Eleanor) went with me, but the Saturday of my fifth journal entry, I went alone—the only time I went alone. As soon as I sat on my usual bench by the river, one of the ducks flew out of the water and landed on the grass eighteen inches from my feet, waddling towards me. Then another four birds simultaneously joined him in surrounding me. Steadily the ring of ducks around me shrank. I stood. They all took a few steps away. I sat. They came closer. I stood. They stepped away. I walked away, and a line of ducks followed me. Eventually, I sat on the other side of the dam, the rushing water muffling everything else. After just a few moments, I was startled to hear a voice beside me asking for a seat on the bench. I looked up to see a wizened homeless man leaning against the side of my bench. “Oh, don’t worry,” he assured me as he sat beside me. “I’m not a rapist or thief. Are you watching the ducks?” he asked. Glaring at the lone seagull perched on the top of the dam, I answered that I was birdwatching for a science class. Then I wrote something in my journal to maintain distance from this self-alleged non-rapist/thief. To be helpful, he narrated everything happening between the ducks and the gulls, hoping to see a fight between them. Tiring of his bird commentary, the man started giving me advice about life, real game-changers like “Don’t drink the river water.” And then two of his buddies joined us and regaled me with stories of the fight they had gotten in the night before. I will admit now, years later, that I did not complete that assignment; I made it fifteen minutes, half of the assigned time, before I decided that I should leave. And that wasn’t even the worst experience from this science class. A couple weeks of torrential rain later, during class, we went out on a leaf-collecting expedition. I collected more mosquito bites than leaves. They swarmed us, and with each minute, I swelled more and more. I swear I heard one mosquito yell “Charge!” before biting me on the lip (which, of course, started swelling). I was one of the last to return to the classroom, windblown, swollen, and with several pints of blood missing. Miserable, I gathered my books and waited for the bell when suddenly the class went silent; it took me a second to realize everyone was looking at me. Naturally, the giggly girls laughed. All my science teacher said was “Wow, Eleanor, I didn’t know that would happen.” Any questions why I’m not a scientist? As my family digs out their cars and driveways from their recent snowstorm, I must content myself with merely looking at a snow sky since my hometown refuses to gather more than a few inches of snow per year. As long as I don’t look at the ground, I can pretend that it’s covered with a blanket of snow; the sky, at least, is looking the part even if it can’t deliver.
As kids, my brother Gabe and I would spend hours sledding down the hill in our backyard. If the snow iced over, we could make it all the way to the front yard. Years later, when we drove by my childhood home, I realized that “the hill” wasn’t even a hill. We actually had been sliding across the lawn rather than down it, relying on our own momentum instead of gravity. But Memory does not exaggerate the amazing blizzards of the early 90s. It snowed and iced, and snowed and iced, until we had stratified snow drifts like the geological layers of rock. Gabe and I could hold onto the church roof to steady ourselves while we walked along the tops of the snow drifts, which startled our mother when she saw boots going by the top of her window. And the sledding that year was like none other: the snow drifts and piles from the snow-ploughs were so high that we didn’t need real hills. Any parking lot would do. Most of my haiku are about snow of winter. And whenever I need to remember what snow feels like, I pull out my snow haiku to reread. Perhaps, you need a reminder, too, so I’ll share them with you. The earth holds its breath As clouds spill stardust, swirling Snow awakens night. Snow muffles all noise save Its squeaking beneath my feet-- It’s too cold to crunch. Afternoon Snow-watching The ground and the trees Are having a snowball fight-- The trees are winning. The streetlamps wore hats Of snow like ice cream curlicues Had melted over them. Winds molded snow up, On, and down until my car Had a snow Mohawk. It’s finally autumn. Okay, I know that technically fall starts in September, but to me it never truly feels like fall until October arrives. Somehow, even though I haven’t lived in the north for almost a decade, I still expected to wake up on October 1st to a blaze of color on the trees and a nip in the air because, to me anyway, that is fall.
Similarly, as soon as that nip is in the air, my mind tells me that it’s good soccer weather. I am no athlete, but my brother and I played almost every sport imaginable in our backyard, a backyard that is probably a mere fraction of the expanse my memory thinks it was. “Okay, Eleanor, I won’t cross half field, I’ll use my right foot, and I won’t enter the goalie box. We’ll play to eleven, and you start with ten,” my brother would say to convince me to play. Despite the handicap, he would still win. He always won. For almost every sport we played, Gabe would handicap himself and win. He didn’t win because he was an amazing athlete; he won because I was a pathetic one. Football was one of the few fall sports we played which Gabe didn’t handicap himself in. Or perhaps he did. I always had to be Michigan State. He got to be U of M, and I had to be Michigan State. Coming from a staunch University of Michigan family, my being forced to be Michigan State was tragic. But Gabe was three years older, and he always pinned me when we wrestled, so, while I may have whined, I didn’t try to change his mind. I would play Michigan State, and Gabe would win. Unfortunately for me, backyard football, unlike backyard baseball doesn’t have ghost players, so my brother and I represented our entire teams. I was Michigan State’s quarterback, wide receiver, running back, all of the line men, and the other positions that sometimes sound made-up. Sometimes I played the referee when I needed to protest against the brutality of University of Michigan’s players. In other words, I normally ended up squashed to the ground with a faceful of autumn leaves watching Gabe steal the ball and run across the yard to make yet another touch-down. Now, seeing pictures of my nieces and nephews playing in the fall leaves of their northern backyard, I feel like a wonderful part of fall is missing this afternoon. Gabe and I haven’t played against each other in years. I actually miss afternoons filled with soccer, football, and other games we invented. If Gabe randomly showed up this afternoon, asking me to play football with him, I would do it—even if I had to be Michigan State. |
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