Back to School
Monday, July 21st, 2008
She left this morning wearing a blue and beige madris dress she’s had since college. The zipper on one side has given out and stops an inch shy from the end of the teeth track, but its kept its color and, otherwise, is as new as her senior year.
After nine years and three children, it’s as though it was tailor made for her return to college. Her academic career has begun again. This time her pursuit is not a BA in elementary ed, but re-certification. In the five years she’s stayed at home with the children during the week, the classroom has changed considerably – that much she’s learned from her one course she’s taken online. But today she stepped back into the classroom from the other perspective, as student, trading the better moments and even the harder ones with the children for her own education.
It is a tremendous trade for her that I imagine, knowing her character, comes with a measure of guilt. Her days at home with our brood are her lifeline, and she teaches them in the most innovative ways using what can be found in and around the house or what crosses their paths on excursions to the neighborhood park or the movie theater.
Just a few weeks ago she turned a caterpillar our daughter found into a science experiment. A cocoon lay in a small cage filled with leaves near the kitchen sink until hatching into a white moth they sat free together. Fuzzy, as he was named, makes random appearances now in the back yard. The children shout his name when they sight any white moth that flutters under the power lines and over the fence posts. Part of that innocence comes from being children, part comes from her and the way she’s taught them to see the world in their time together.
But she’s sacrificed it, without complaint, in hopes of bringing them a better life one day. She deserves a new dress, I think, as she steps out onto the front porch and the geraniums in hanging baskets that have just gotten a fresh morning drink. Water stands in places pooled on the treated wood slabs. No one will be here to water them during this heat spell and it’s then that I realize that even the flowers will miss her.
