Gray Friday

Today is a gray day. There was rain earlier–the sidewalks were damp when I took in this week’s grocery delivery–but it did not rain while I walked Roxy, except for a sprinkle or two right as we arrived back home.

While we were walking, I heard a flock of Canada geese honking overhead, far above the reach of anyone’s holiday dinner table.

Today J and I will take our usual afternoon walk around the neighborhood, followed perhaps by a short drive. Yesterday the streets and sidewalks were mostly empty, more of our neighbors choosing to travel for the holiday than in the past two pandemic years.

Still, we saw and noted groups of pedestrians who were obviously visiting for Thanksgiving: large multi-generational groups including multiple dogs and bored teenagers who looked like spending time with extended family would kill them.

 

Gone to seed

After a full season of flowering, what quiet relief does a hibiscus feel to finally go to seed?

 

A professor who isn’t theirs

This semester, after teaching first-year writing at Framingham State since 2012, I am complementing my usual teaching with studio tutoring, meeting with several small cohorts of students from someone else’s Comp I class to help them write and revise their assignments.

Teaching writing to your own students is completely different from tutoring for someone else’s class. My tutoring students are working on essays I didn’t assign and I won’t grade. I don’t have to prepare lessons: I just show up for my studio sessions and ask “What are you working on today?”

So far, I’m loving the different set of teaching muscles that tutoring flexes. When you’re not responsible for grading students, you can focus simply on helping them improve the draft they currently have. You focus on the steps they can take right now to make this draft better rather than comparing that draft with an idealized “A paper” in your head.

Since you’re the student’s tutor, not instructor, you’re also free to help them work on anything they bring you, not just Comp I assignments. Last week I gave several tutoring students some pointers on how to read a journal article for a chemistry class, and I helped another student brainstorm and start drafting a movie review for a 100-level literature class.

When you teach, it’s your job to set and stick to an agenda, keeping students on topic in order to “cover the material.” But in a tutoring session, there is no agenda to enforce and no material to cover. Instead, you try to help students with anything they are working on, even if “all” they need is to talk to a professor who isn’t theirs.

 

Not quite Spring

Friday was a sleety, stay-at-home day, and yesterday I cleared a crust of snow and freezing rain from our cars early in the day so they would bake clean in the sun. Yesterday, the unshoveled sidewalks in our neighborhood–all the sidewalks, since you can’t shovel freezing rain–were crunchy with a topping of snow over ice, which gave good traction underfoot. This morning, though, even the snow has frozen slick, and we’re expecting rain and temperatures above freezing–melting weather–tomorrow into the week, which will turn everything into a slippery slop.

Welcome to not-quite Spring in Massachusetts.

I’ve lived in New England for three decades now–most of my adult life–and for all that time I’ve said New England doesn’t have a proper spring. Instead, we go straight from snow to mud to heat, without the weeks of temperate weather and wildflowers the Midwest gets in March. In New England, March comes in like a lion then stays, the threat of spring snowstorms lurking into April.

But climate change is affecting this: we get as much rain as snow these days, along with an abundance of bare frozen ground. Last weekend’s storm dumped more than a foot of snow on our backyard: only the second plowable snowfall of the season, and the first accumulation to stay a while.

This coming week’s temperatures in the 40s with rain aren’t quite Spring, but they certainly aren’t winter, either. Sunlight is the cleanest way to melt snow, shrinking it steadily into the dry air. Rain melts snow, too, but in a way that turns streets, sidewalks, and backyards into puddles by day and skating rinks by night.

 

After dark

I’ve lived in New England for decades, but there are two things that will never seem natural to me: how early it gets dark here in winter, and the lack of a proper spring.

Since the time change, it’s dark when I walk Roxy after dinner. She has a light on her collar, and I carry a flashlight, but we are regularly startled by other walkers who dress in somber colors and don’t carry a light, their forms materializing out of the darkness like solid ghosts.

Tonight, it started drizzling just as Roxy and I set out, and after we turned toward home, forked branches of lightning lit the sky, followed by rumbling thunder. Since when, I wondered, do we have thunderstorms in November?

As we approached the house, a flock of roosting turkeys gobbled en masse from the trees across the street, as unsettled by the thunder as I was. You never know what surprises lurk on suburban streets after dark.

 

November fire

Today is gray and rainy, which I don’t mind since the leaves are still aglow with November fire. The wind is rattling the windows, and I’m happy to be inside at my desk with a mug of tea, writing.

This morning when I walked Roxy, there was a red upholstered chair on the curb outside a house down the street, its arms worn and torn, but its color reassuringly autumnal. The scent of damp, fallen leaves was ripe in the air, and Roxy insisted on sniffing every decaying pile.

 

Against dark days to come

November sunlight is my favorite kind. It angles low through gold and copper leaves, gleaming like light refracted through stained glass.

As the days shorten, November sunlight is precious. The days of December through March are dreary in New England: either too dark or too glaring. November light is bronze and burnished. Knowing what comes next, I soak in as much sunlight as possible, storing it in my heart like a battery against dark days to come.

 

The morning after

Last night felt almost like the Before Times, with herds of children roaming the streets, in some cases accompanied by attentive and even costumed parents, and in other cases roaming free and unfettered by adult supervision. This morning, the sidewalks are littered with stray candy wrappers, and lawns boast the crumpled remains of inflatable ghosts and monsters, ready to go into hibernation for another year.

 

Re-entry

A (not her real initial) and I hadn’t seen each other in-person since February, 2020, when we’d met to see an exhibit of street art and orchids at Tower Hill Botanic Garden.  As was true of many of the things we did in the early months of 2020, A and I had no idea we were living in the Before Times.  Instead, we took for granted our ritual of occasionally meeting halfway between our respective homes to enjoy a walk, art exhibit, or conversation over lunch…until COVID put an end to that.

Over the course of the pandemic, A, a mutual friend, and I have had the requisite Zoom happy hours to celebrate Christmas and each of our birthdays, with gifts shipped ahead of time.  More frequently over this past year, A and I scheduled Saturday night phone calls to keep in touch.  Without the need to stare at a screen, we were free to talk while folding laundry, piecing together a puzzle, or lounging with the dog:  the kind of leisurely conversation that is the antidote to Zoom fatigue.

Now that both A and I are fully vaccinated, we planned to meet yesterday for a walk in central Massachusetts…but when a cold, rainy forecast put a literal damper on those plans, we met in Northampton instead.  Equipped with rain gear and umbrellas, we walked around the Smith College campus, had lunch downtown at Sylvester’s, and went shopping at Thornes Marketplace:  the exact sort of thing we did countless times before the pandemic shut down our social lives.

Yesterday, everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more wondrous.  Repeatedly since J and I attained fully vaccinated status several weeks ago, I’ve had an unbidden and entirely spontaneous realization:  we lived.  While the virus raged, we hunkered down and followed every public health advisory.  We washed our hands, kept our distance, wore our masks, and avoided crowds.  We stayed home and didn’t socialize.  And now that we’re fully vaccinated, we’re enjoying re-entry, trusting the same science that kept us safe to continue to protect us in this next-normal.

So yesterday, when A and I settled in for a late lunch at Sylvester’s, I knew I had to order eggs.  Since J and I stopped going to restaurants in March, 2020, I haven’t had eggs, bacon, waffles, or pancakes:  foods J and I order when we go out for brunch, but don’t cook at home.  The process of re-entry has been a series of re-introductions:  the first time seeing friends again, the first time eating at restaurants again, the first time strolling through a mall and window-shopping again.  Words can’t describe how wonderful it is to enjoy these simple pleasures again.

 

Sunday stroll

Warm November Sundays are especially sweet when you know the dark days of winter aren’t far behind.