Home again.

As I drove us home from the airport this evening, my newly repatriated Clevelander student tried her hand at shooting the sunset through the backseat windows.  And somehow the whole experience felt just right for a day that celebrates parenting.  My father is one of the people who taught me to look everywhere, at everything, all the time, and he's one of the people who helped me build one of the skill sets that I use to get my seeing done.  He is also perhaps the person who did the most to prime me for the experience of appreciating the extraordinary people in my life--which in turn has come to mean that I have a full sense of my extravagant good fortune at having been born his daughter.  I love you, Papa.  Thank you.

Sentinel.

When his excellent parents are gone, he misses them so.

Flowering.

Where there were buds yesterday, there are flowers today: suddenly the lilies are opened all over town.  To my surprise, I find that a flower I didn't much like when I moved here is now a flower to which I look forward, at least a little.  And then I realize that "when I moved here" is now a half-decade ago, and that a lot can happen (and not-happen) in that long a stretch of time, which has passed almost embarrassingly swiftly.

We take a deep breath and push on one more time, and then we have completed our first fifteen course hours.  And when I sit on the couch to watch another movie (so wonderfully strange!) with my excellent friends, I am wide awake, except for the few minutes midway through when I am not, at all.

Budding.

One thing about the summer course is that it has me up and out in the world earlier than I'd normally be (or than I'd generally choose).  And the colors are different, early on.

In the press of the course, which requires action and maintenance for hours of each day, my packing has completely ceased, leaving me a massive project for the weekend.

Just before the middle of the night Wednesday, the power cuts out, and only then do I hear a transformer blow.  This afternoon, we learn how our students coped with the absence of computers, the suspension of written work: clustering together with their few flashlights, poring over their reading assignments in near-dark.  We learn that a fire started in the transformer.  I find this news more disturbing by far than our usual suppositions of suicidal squirrels.   

By evening, I watch a movie with my excellent friends, and within twenty minutes, I am sound asleep on the couch.  "I think we've lost her," I hear them say when I surface briefly.  "I'm just so exhausted," I protest, slipping under again.

Unrequested gifts.

We are also in the time of fast learning curves, swift affections.  The pace of the summer course means that what might normally take weeks instead takes mere days.  We learn how their eagerness looks.  They learn how to read our offerings.  Suddenly, eye contact down a table becomes adequate invitation to speak.  Suddenly, a cocked eyebrow speaks paragraphs.  Everyone takes a deep breath and gets in up to the elbows.  And we are at work.  Which is also play.  Which is also deadly serious.  Which is also immense, deep fun.