Slice of Life – Page 4 – A(nother) Year of Reading

Slice of Life: Tear Jerkers

*Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.*

I have this thing for books that make me cry. When I was in middle school, Sunday afternoons were for kicking back on my bed and rereading LITTLE BRITCHES or WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS or OLD YELLER or LOVE STORY or CHARLOTTE’S WEB and letting the tears roll down my cheeks and into my ears even though I knew what was going to happen. Maybe especially because I knew what was going to happen.

I recently listened again to Krista Tippet interview Kate DiCamillo (On Nurturing Capacious Hearts) and Kate (in a response to an essay by Matt de la Peña) gave me the words for why I love books that make me cry:

“My childhood best friend read Charlotte’s Web over and over again as a kid. She would read the last page, turn the book over, and begin again. A few years ago, I asked her why.

“‘What was it that made you read and reread that book?’” I asked her. “‘Did you think that if you read it again, things would turn out differently, better? That Charlotte wouldn’t die?’

“‘No,’” she said. “‘It wasn’t that. I kept reading it not because I wanted it to turn out differently or thought that it would turn out differently, but because I knew for a fact that it wasn’t going to turn out differently. I knew that a terrible thing was going to happen, and I also knew that it was going to be okay somehow. I thought that I couldn’t bear it, but then when I read it again, it was all so beautiful. And I found out that I could bear it. That was what the story told me. That was what I needed to hear. That I could bear it somehow.’”

Go listen to the whole interview. Both Kate and Krista are wise and funny and generous.

And if you wonder why the world needs TELEPHONE OF THE TREE, a book about a grief so palpable I dare you not to feel it and weep, it’s so that every reader has access to what Ursula Le Guin calls our Operating Instructions and what Rudine Sims Bishop called windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.

Here’s more about Ursula Le Guin’s essay “Operating Instructions” from which Kate quotes “The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.”

Here is Matt de la Peña’s essay in Time Magazine, and here is Kate DiCamillo’s response (although you can, alternatively, read it in the transcript of the interview with Krista and not be bothered by the ads).

Slice of Life: Famous

The rose-breasted grosbeaks are back.

I checked back in the current five-year diary (I’m in year two) and in the ten-year volume that came before and found that last year the rose-breasted grosbeaks appeared on May 9, and their first appearance ever was six years ago in May of 2018. (Reading back through my snippets from May of 2021, the end of my last year of teaching, was a bit of a rabbit hole…)

You’ve noticed that there are no rose-breasted grosbeaks in the photo. They seem to be more wild than our usual visitors. They came several times while I stood there waiting with my camera, but just the sight of my outline through the glass door was enough to send them winging right away.

While I stood there, I was thinking of Famous, by Naomi Shihab Nye, and what a privilege it is to be famous to these gorgeous birds for our suet feeder. And to the early hummingbirds who come to the coral bells you can see peeking in the left side of the picture. Also to the black swallowtails who know they can find fennel, the monarchs who know they can find milkweed, and the lightning bugs who can thrive in a chemical-free yard.

This is all the fame I need.

Slices of Life

Slices of life —

onionskin thin
just as fragrant — redolent
tantalizing

back porch eclipse watch
astronomical magic
transformed our world

reading Jane Hirschfield
before my own pencil moves —
aspirational

Louder Than Hunger*
Jake silences The Voice
claims self-worth

*If you haven’t read this book yet, move it to the top of your TBR.

Slice of Life: Deluge

Too. Much. Rain.

We had probably 1.5″ yesterday, and so far this morning 1.75″ with more forecast for today, tomorrow…all the way through to Friday, with a brief respite before it clouds up again on Monday for the eclipse.

“Lake Easement” has engulfed both back beds…

…but our neighbor has it worse.

Here’s my haiku for today:

aftermath
robin song signals respite
it won’t last

ⓒMary Lee Hahn, 2024

Slice of Life: Election Day

It’s Election Day in Ohio. My third election serving as a roster judge.

I woke up before my 4:00am alarm, dreaming strange dreams about my first apartment. I have to be on site at 5:30am. My tea is brewing as I write.

I will spend the day greeting folks from my neighborhood/area — the ones who didn’t vote early and who will bother to come and voice their preference for presidential candidate (even though that’s already been settled) and for judges and other offices on the ballot.

Pretty much all day, I will be sitting in a folding chair in a chilly church gymnasium.

Other poll workers complain about the long day, but I have been a teacher. I have gotten up extra early to finish plans or read the last few essays, worked a day where pretty much all day I was on my feet moving from student to student, group to group, teaching, guiding, putting out behavioral fires. As a poll worker, I get a one-hour lunch. As a teacher, I often ate my lunch while I was doing recess duty. Then, with a 1/2 hour break after the students left, I started another half day of work and did parent conferences until 8:00pm or later. And got up in the morning and did it, more or less, all over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. Yes, this will be a long day, but it will be one day, and the work will not be at all hard.

When we close the polls, I will be achey and exhausted, but glad that I was able to help Democracy march forward in my small way.

When I retired, I was achey and exhausted, but glad I was able to help Public Education march forward in my small way.

Slice of Life: Salamanders

Ten days ago, I moved an item from my bucket list to my treasured memory list. In a cold rain in the pitch-dark of nearly-bedtime on a boardwalk over a tiny patch of bald cypress swamp with a red light flashlight I met my very first in-the-wild spotted salamanders.

These were salamanders returning, as all salamanders do, to the vernal pool where they were born. As adults, they live in burrows in the nearby woods.

Salamanders respond to soil temperature to let them know when it’s time to crawl out of their burrows in the forest and return home to mate.

A female salamander can store packets of spermatophore inside her body for years as insurance for the continuation of the species.

If a vernal pool is drying up too fast, a young salamander tadpole can speed up development so that they can reach adulthood — albeit smaller than usual — before the pool is gone.

Salamanders can live twenty years in the wild.

Their mechanisms for survival are so very elegant and woven so perfectly with their corner of the natural world. Which is a sentence that can be written about every species of living thing on this planet.

Except one.

Slice of Life: Bystander

It’s like riding your bike up the street past the high school towards the swimming pool and seeing the parking lot full of cars. Which is odd, because there’s usually like three cars — just the high school lifeguards who get there early to check the chemicals and maybe vacuum some of the gravel out of the bottom of the pool after last night’s thunderstorm. Rescue a few critters and skim a bunch of crickets before the summer swim team practices.

It’s like walking up to the breezeway that’s usually silent and dark with only the bright blue of the pool on the other end to light it up and finding it buzzing with activity and the pool divided up with lane lines and decorated above with plastic banners and -bang!- there’s a starter’s gun and splashing and cheering and…

It’s like everybody else knew there was a swim meet today and you are just showing up for a regular practice.

That’s what it feels like to be tiptoeing in here on the fifth day of your big month-long swim meet of writing. I’ll just stand here in the shade by the clerk of the course while you all find your lanes and swim with your strongest strokes and team up for the relays. I’ll cheer you on and bring you bunches of cold green grapes to give you energy.

Happy March Slicing Challenge, all! May you make it to the finish line without your goggles ever fogging up!

Slice of Life: Surprises

I surprised myself yesterday. There was no way I could write to the prompt of “slumber party games” by going through memory’s front door. The “slumber party memories” door is kept shut with a chair lodged under the knob.

So I had to find another way in. I looked for the farthest thing from my own reality, and came up with a mouse living in a (mostly) fictional woodpile.

Or at least I thought my character was far from my own reality. Instead, I found an very familiar introverted mouse living in my imagination. One who wishes for the things it seems like everyone else has, but who, in the end, is very happy with her own little life.

Slice of Life: Research

YOU BROKE IT!
by Liana Finck
Rise x Penguin Workshop, 2024
review copy from the public library

This is a very funny book and it made for an interesting research question, but you don’t need to buy it for your classroom or school library.

It was written/drawn by a cartoonist, so it should come as no surprise that the whole story consists of a series of sight gags — adult animals scolding their young for doing what they naturally do: a turtle moving slowly, a tornado making a mess, an earthwork squirming. Finally, the young octopus stands up for itself, the adult has an AH-HA moment, and all is made well with a multi-armed hug.

My research question was, “Who would think this is a funny book?” I took it to the after-school program where I work and tested four different audiences.

The director, a mom with grown children, thought it was funny. One of the classroom aids, a college-aged lad, didn’t think it was funny at all.

When the kids arrived after school, I tested it on a group consisting of two kindergarteners and a first grader. They were quick to use the cover and endpapers to infer that the adult bird was mad at someone who broke the egg. The adult bird didn’t break the egg, and the baby bird didn’t break the egg. Someone else broke the egg and this was going to be a book about Who Broke The Egg. So when the second spread featured an earthworm, they were thrown for a loop. However, some very good inferring ensued: “I’m not sure what squirming means,” said the first grader, “but I think it might mean wiggling.”

Besides the inferring, some surprising background knowledge was revealed. Eventually they realized that the adult animals were probably parents, and because the tornado was wearing a bowtie, it was a dad. When we turned the page to the frog, the first grader refused to choose between mom and dad. “I think the frog is non-binary.” Then, concerned, she asked me, “Do you know what non-binary means?”

“Yes, I know what that means.”

“Good,” she said, turning to the kindergarteners. “Do you want me to explain what non-binary means?”

I quickly intervened, “Let’s save that conversation for later.”

Final verdict from the K/1 crew: not a funny book. It didn’t even answer the question of Who Broke It?

My next group consisted of two third graders and a first grader, all in gifted/enrichment programs at school. On the first page turn after the bird and chick (worm and wormlet), one of the third graders exclaimed, “Oh, I get it! This is going to be a book about grownups yelling at kids for doing what they naturally do!” Every page turn after that was met with a chorus of “…because that’s what we’re SUPPOSED to do!” At the pony page (“Get the hair out of your eyes!”) I stopped and asked if adults had ever said any of these things to them. And indeed, they had been told (“a million times”) to get the hair out of their eyes, or hurry up, or settle down.

Final verdict from the 1/3 crew: a very funny book.

Everything we know about the development of children’s ability to move beyond the literal and understand humor was confirmed. There also seems to be a component of experience that determines whether this book is funny. The 1/3 crew is still in the phase of life where adults are correcting their behavior on a regular basis. The college lad is well-removed from that, but hasn’t had the experience of being on the parental end of those corrections. The mom with grownup kids has the lived experience of this book.

So, who should buy this book, since lots of kids are either not going to get it, or not going to pick up a book that consists of a series of corrections they hear from the adults in their lives, with very little agency given to the young animals in each situation (except for the octopus fry)? Seems like a $20.00 baby shower card, given to remind new parents that kids will be kids, even though the “big idea blurb” on the back of the book has it the other way around: “Parents will be parents…”

Slice of Life: Ready

I went downstairs to my studio intending to play around with some applique. My eyes fell on Great Grandmother’s quilt, folded on the back of the couch, waiting. I’ve been working intermittently (for a year!) on repairing one ring of hexagons in one flower of the “Grandmother’s Flower Garden” pattern. The fabric in that one ring had completely disintegrated.

“You’re not allowed to play until you finish repairing that quilt,” I told myself. “After all, the work of the repair is a kind of applique, or at least uses some of the same skills.” So I picked up my needle, ready to get to it.

The pieces I had previously replaced provide a snapshot of my learning. In other words, my stitching was progressing from embarrassingly awkward to somewhat tidy. Little did I know that when I picked up my needle I would find that my skills had taken a quantum leap forward.

Since the last time I worked on the quilt repair, I had taken Jo Avery’s online class in fabric book making. If you follow her on IG, you know she has a very distinctive style of applique, primarily stitching impressionistic birds and flowers. So I learned needle-turn applique from a master. Not only did I learn and practice the technique, but I began using the proper tools — a thin milliners needle and tiny smooth-headed applique pins.

When I picked up the needle to get started again, the first thing I realized was that I had been using an all-purpose embroidery needle, which was downright clunky compared to a milliners needle. And my long, flat-headed sewing pins were pulling puckers in the tiny hexagons that made it impossible to sew one to the next.

Fitting new hexagons into an already-completed and decades-old quilt is still tricky, fiddly work. But armed with better skills and the right tools, I feel ready to take this repair to the finish line. And I feel sure that the last hexagons in the circle will make the spirit of Great Grandmother proud of her descendant’s learning journey.