Here I am, back from vacation and in school again. I didn’t realize how much I missed the sun until I was back swimming in it. It was wonderful being back in Tucson with the open expanse of the desert tugging at the eye and the heart, the bright border of mountains that edge the bowl of a sky so huge and blue that the land seems like it can never be filled.
I brought it back in the lightness of my newly colored hair and the spring in my step. I thought that the first day back was going to be horrible compared with vacation. And, needless to say, the 5:30 wake-up was difficult. But walking into school… it felt comfortable. Energizing even. There was work to be done and I was ready to do it.
We’re in the groove now. The teachers know us and turn to us when we they think we can help them with certain students. Kids pass us in the hall and give us high-fives, they call to us in the lunchroom. We’ve even had students say that they wanted to get suspended just so that they could come to our classroom and students who don’t have to come to the tutoring program come anyways.
My magazine club is coming to a breathtaking conclusion. We’ve got a ton of stories and submitted drawings and poems and the class grasped layout a lot quicker than I thought they would. I’ve got to do some work on publisher this week to get a rough draft done according to what they laid out but it’s well worth it looking at all the work they’ve put into it.
Hello again Seattle. I think this might be the beginning of a beautiful thing.