Winding Down

With only fifteen days left of this school year, most of what's going to be taught has been taught. Students are coasting to the end, riding in neutral and refusing to gas up again before finals.

Atypically, I feel their apathy. Normally, I'm pushing them hard, cracking a whip until the last day and cramming as much as possible into every day. But this year, we're all just glad to be alive.

A winter packed with snow that closed school has been followed by a tornadic Spring. One storm after another perks up sirens across the county, disrupting several good nights' rest and a number of classes, too. Friends and family have suffered homes destroyed; flooding threatens many of our neighborhoods and our routes to school.

Somehow, so much depends upon far more than a red (or green or black) wheelbarrow glazed (or covered) with rainwater (or floodwater) beside white (or any other color) chickens. In fact, as I listen to the urban rooster down the street, crowing at the sky breaking through a rare crack in the stormclouds, I hear the sound of my son, coughing some nasty croupy stuff, and I think about the children who are sick and whose homes were destroyed in last week's tornados and the winds just three weeks ago.

If we never read any more poetry, if we never practice any more composition skills, if we never discuss another short story, let us at least learn to love: let us love by finding needs and filling them. No words. Just the hands of love serving. What a final exam that would be.

In the meantime, tomorrow's vocabulary test is still a go -- though it seems trivial in view of the life swirling around me.