Our school, like most around here, is run on a series of wood-burning, hot water boilers called sobas. and they tend to be unreliable and not terribly good at heating anything. The rooms are warmer than the halls, and the halls are warmer than outside, but its been sitting at -20 F for a week and "warmer" is on that relative sliding scale usually reserved for igloo terminology.
Igloos, by the way, are uninsulated, impermanent structures. Cinderblock walls with unglazed windows and no mention of tapestries at least cause me to think of layering clothes in a completely new way. However! The unglazed windows have become a thing of fascination for me! Did you know that if you press your hand, lightly, on a thickly frosted glass window, and take it off relatively quickly, your skin will melt the ice just where your prints are, so you are left with a police mugbook quality print in frozen condensation of 600 teenagers breathing? Its fantastic!
To make a long story short I have a flu like sickness confining me to bed. Mom's winter care package of DayQuil, NyQuil, long underwear, gorgeous thick socks, tea and poetry books has come at the perfect moment! Gods bless my parents.
I'm not the only one getting care packages either! (Franny, I wish you could have seen this) Today I didn't really teach my lovely second grade class... a woman came in with felt puppets and told a lively rendition of the nativity ending with "and that is why we get presents on Christmas! So here are your presents!"
Every one of these children who cannot afford to buy new copy books so I'm handing out typing paper and pens every class, was then given a shiny, christmas wrapped shoe box sealed with "Samaritan Purse" tape. Each package had a To/From sticker on it. The To was for Girl or Boy, tick this, this or this age.
If any of you (I know many of you do, cus you do it with me) ever put together a charity shoebox present and wondered if it mattered, if you'd bother again next year, if maybe you skimped and should have added a bag of cherry flavored cough drops or 2B pencils, wonder no longer. My kids love you. They love you like you will never know until your English class gets interrupted by true joy.
1 comment:
In many caves, stretching from France to Australia, there are negative paintings of hands painted on the cave walls. The artists held their hands against the stone and then blew pigment against them, creating an outline of their hands on the raw rock.
Most people see this as a frozen example of an artist's signature, made on raw stone.
I see it as humans reaching their hands through the rock, into the futue they cannot see, knowing it will come.
Put your hand on the stone.
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