Moonset and Midwinters

I often cannot see the night sky, here in the mountains of North Carolina.  There's usually too many trees that obscure the view, which seems a fair trade most nights.  But in the winter months of no leaves on the trees, I get unexpected treats as I glimpse a star here and there.

This morning there was the delight of the setting moon.  I was working on a poem that I was writing, a poem inspired by an in-class writing experiment that led to some good student writing (see this blog post for details).  I thought I might write from the point of view of the saw mill blade, but instead, I focused on the door frame, the door frame that was once a tree, that sacrificed essential parts of itself to become a door frame.  Was it worth it?  The door frame feels sorrow, much like many adults I know who feel sorrow about the sacrifices made along the way.

As I was writing it, the poem seemed tired and trite to me.  Writing about it now, I think it has potential.  I'll put it away for a bit and see if anything new comes to me.

As I was writing, the setting moon caught my eye, and I thought, I'd probably see this beautiful moon better if I turned off the lights in this room.  And so, I did, and it was amazing, watching the moon set beyond the bare branches of the trees.  The moon was shrouded in haze, so it had more of a Halloween vibe than a December vibe.  I tried to summon a December feeling by thinking about the haunting Christmas hymn, "In the Deep Midwinter."  I thought about Christina Rossetti, author of the words.

I wrote this Facebook post:   "The moon is setting to the west, and I see it through the bare branches of the trees, and I hum a bit of "In the Bleak Midwinter," and think about Christina Rossetti's underappreciated brilliance, like the brilliance of the moon, reflecting the light of those Pre-Raphaelites, transforming that light into something far more focused and incisive."

I thought about trying to take a picture to go with the Facebook post, but my phone isn't as advanced as those that other people have.  The picture would have been more spooky than wintry, if it captured anything much at all.

And now the mountains are the rosy purple of reflected sunrise.  And now it is time to get back to grading, a constant for the next few days.

First Week of December Thoughts on Year End Lists and More

I had every intention of writing yesterday; after all, I had a largely unstructured day, since my ear doctor appointment got moved from Tuesday to Monday.   I had every intention of walking too.  

And how did my day get away from me?  I should be more specific--my mornings are the times when I have plans for getting things done.  Yesterday I started baking because we had the idea of sending a care package to a nephew who is studying for final exams.  I kept baking, and when my spouse was at the dentist, I wanted to enjoy having the house to myself, so I didn't go for a walk.  I was making progress on the endless grading that is constant at the end of the term, so I kept going.

By later in the day, after I got back from the post office and the library, it was windy, so I decided to hunker down, watch T.V., and sew some quilt squares.

Let me record some thoughts from the past few days:

--I was sad to hear about the death of Tom Stoppard and astonished to realize that he was 88 years old.  I had forgotten that he wrote the screenplay to Shakespeare in Love.  If I ever get to teach the Brit Lit survey class again, I'll end by having us watch that movie in its entirety.  It's an interesting counterpoint to Waiting for Godot--in some sense, it's in the absurdist line of theatre, but it's also different in ways that make sense as a way to close the course.  It looks both forward and backward, and it's a work from 1999, which gets me closer to the 21st century than I got this year, when I ended with Waiting for Godot.  I feel vaguely guilty for ending the course in the 1950's, and showing a film that features a Stoppard screenplay would alleviate my guilt.

--I went to the post office yesterday expecting a big crowd--it is early December, after all.  Happily there was only one person already at the counter and then me in line.  I bought some holiday stamps, even though I already have plenty of stamps.  I thought of my grandfather, my mom's dad, who collected stamps and taught me how to do it.  I wondered if anyone still collects stamps.

--We've been binge watching NYPD Blue.  I am using the term binge watching perhaps differently than some do, especially when talking about a series that lasted from 1993 until 2005.  It's a show we return to, but it's easy to dip in and out.  There are enough story lines that go across episodes that make me want to return to it.  It's well written and well acted, and it seems as worthy of attention as any of the "prestige TV" shows that aired on HBO in the past decades.  I watched it for a few years when it first aired, but I don't remember much of it.  Because it was a weekly show that was on the air for so long, there's a lot to watch, and we are watching it on a channel that just runs the show, episode after episode, so we can't pause the series.

--I am looking at a variety of year-end Best of _____ lists.  I'm no longer surprised when I haven't heard of most of the movies on the list.  But this year I'm surprised how few of the books crossed my radar screen until landing on the year end list.  And many of the ones that are on the list that I've heard of are ones I didn't like.  Hmm.

--Yesterday I took our Thanksgiving hambone and turned it into a pot of bean soup--what alchemy!  For decades when I cooked vegetarian beans, there would always be someone who asked what gave them flavor without the pork.  I never understood the question until a few years ago when I got to take the hambone home.

Reading Day, 2025

If you came to this blog hoping that you'd find a meditation on World AIDS Day or the anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, head over this post on my theology blog.  I did some brief researching of AIDS statistics, which are sobering:   according to a UN Fact Sheet, 1.3 million people worldwide contracted AIDS in 2024 alone--that's just one year. Since the beginning of this epidemic, 91.4 million people have been infected, and 44.1 million have died of the disease.

Today will be a different work day for me.  My students at Spartanburg Methodist College have a reading day today, followed by several days of final exams, but I don't have to report to campus. Grades are due at SMC on Dec. 8, and Dec. 10 for my online classes. So I have lots of grading this week, but it will feel easy because there's no commuting to Spartanburg.

This morning felt luxurious in some ways:  I can put off my walk until later in the morning, so I've had a slower morning than most Mondays have been.  I'm trying not to think about next semester, where I'll have a class that starts at 9, so Mondays won't be slow-paced at all.  Maybe I will keep an extra pair of sneakers in my office and go for my walk later in the mornings on MWF.  I won't get much in the way of hill training, but it would be good to have that option.

I will start grading later.  Today is one of the few days where I don't have meetings or appointments scheduled, so I'm trying to savor the slowness.

I still have that hollow-brained feeling when it comes to composing poems, but I do have the capacity to read.  Earlier this semester, I heard the author Richard Osman interviewed on NPR, in advance of the Netflix version of his book, The Thursday Murder Club, the book which is now a series of books.  I hadn't heard of any of it before, but the interview whetted my appetite.  The book is just as delightful as I hoped it would be.

Yesterday my spouse was sewing on the machine, which meant that watching TV wasn't really possible.  I decided to put away my sewing, switch to Christmas music on Spotify, and sink into that book.  It was a wonderful part of the afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll go get the next batch of books that I've ordered from the public library--next up will be Ian McEwan's latest, which has gotten great reviews.  I'll read it first, since I suspect I won't be able to renew it.

A reading day, a holiday spent reading--delightful!

Balancing Acts in the Time to Come

In some ways, life returns to normal today.  We are headed across the mountains soon, so I can preach and preside at Faith Lutheran's worship service which begins at 10, with Confirmation at 9.  There may have been some freezing precipitation in the highest elevations, but it looks like the worst stayed to the east.

In some ways, normal life is on vacation until mid-January when I report back to campus at Spartanburg Methodist College.  I'm not done with my teaching life--no, in some ways, it's getting even more intense, as all the classes that I teach, in person and online, come to a crashing close at the same time, with grades due within 24 hours of each other.  But I won't be commuting.

In the time freed up by not commuting, I hope to have a bit of writing time in the next week, along with some reading time.  I hope to redistribute the creative energy that is so often spent on planning for daily classes to writing new poems.

I know that I tend to overschedule myself in these weeks off because I'm trying to make up for lost time.  I did not have much time off this summer, which makes my need to catch up with friends even more intense, along with my need for down time.

It's a delicate balancing act, and I hope to be intentional about the balancing.

Thanksgiving History in Fabric Scraps

Here I sit, at the kitchen table of the big, ramshackle house at Lutheridge, the church camp where my family has always had our holiday festivities (well, since 1992 or so), the house where we’ve assembled for at least 20 years.  It was at this table, on the Saturday of Thanksgiving week-end in 2022, where I first assembled the log cabin patch out of scraps, and I’ve been doing it ever since, and may just continue to do it until my fingers won’t let me.

It has been a great Thanksgiving this year, although zooming by too fast, and I know I likely say that every year.  This year, all the members of the next generation are teenagers now, which brings a certain sadness about all the books we’re not reading about giving a mouse a cookie or llamas in pajamas.

 Happily, there are other joys.  We spent much of the week-end helping the oldest teenager in the house with a project she envisioned:  letters made of fabric scraps, sewed on a sweatshirt.  When my cousin wrote me in advance and told me what she had in mind, I brought all my fabric scraps with me.

 

 

The project became a bit bigger than we first thought it would be.  She chose small squares, and we made them into larger squares of four patches; then we made took the template she’d made of paper letters and cut out the fabric.  We used the Steam-a-seam product to make sure the letters didn’t move around.

 

 

And what do you know—it worked!  It looked very much like the picture that had provided the inspiration, and she was very happy with it.  The whole family had a great spirit going in, and they assured my spouse and me (mostly me) that whatever happened would be fine.  I was worried about a ruined sweatshirt and the crushing of creative dreams—I’m so happy that didn’t happen.  The oldest teenager was so happy with her creation that she wore it on the long car trip home.  I wish we had had more time to sew the letters to the sweatshirt, but she knows how to do it, and her mom knows some folks who will help, and in the meantime, they won’t wash the sweatshirt.

In a way, that’s a metaphor for the whole holiday time together—the worry that the experience won’t live up to expectations, the happiness of time together, the realization that it’s all going to be O.K., even if not exactly perfect.

                                                                                                           

Thanksgiving Morning

Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.

You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.

That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.

But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!

Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.

Let me take a moment before Thanksgiving starts in earnest, a moment to remember some of the wonderful events that have already happened:

--We have managed to gather at the ramshackle house at Lutheridge where we have gathered almost every year since 1992.

--Not everyone could come. But we had new participants—yesterday my mom and uncle’s cousin’s wife came over for a wonderful afternoon of talking and reminiscing.

--The babies that I once read to are now teenagers. They are grown but not gone yet. They have interests (fabric! Cooking! Getting ready for Christmas!) that intersect with mine. What a delight.

--We did not gather at this house last year because of hurricane damage from Helene. I have not looked out of these windows at Thanksgiving until this year, although I was in the house in September. In September, the view was obscured by the trees still in full leaf. Now that the leaves are down, I’m sobered by how few trees are actually there.

--It is also sobering to think about how much older we all are. On the other side of the spectrum from babies grown into teenagers are the rest of the family, with a variety of health challenges.

But for today, we are here, the house is still here, and we will celebrate that fact with food, my favorite meal of the whole year.

Gratitude Tuesday: British Lit, Teaching, and the Larger Perspective

This morning, I'm trying to remember to do my writing first before going to teaching duties.  Yesterday I did grading for my online classes; I thought I was caught up with grading late work, only to discover that I had some more to do.  It's not a huge deal--it's late work, after all, so students should have no expectation of timely grading.  But the term is ending soon, so there's some pressure, all self-imposed, because the semester isn't ending that soon.

In short, I was in a sour mood yesterday.  That's not the reason I didn't do any blogging.  I didn't do any blogging because time just zoomed away from me.

I went to school yesterday, and had a good in-person teaching day.  My English 101 class got their final exam writing assignment and settled in to write--they are one of the best classes I've ever had about settling in to a writing day.

My British Lit class was wonderful in a different way.  I did a variation of an in-person final exam that I did in the spring with my American Lit class (see this blog post for more information).  My Brit Lit class is much smaller, so I skipped some steps.  First I had them write their top 5 list, the 5 works we studied which most inform their understanding of the world today, the top 5 list of works that they would keep on the syllabus.  Then I had them divide into 2 groups of 4 students.  Each group made a group list and put it on the board at the same time.

Both groups had Frankenstein at the #1 spot, which I expected.  I was happy that both groups also included "Goblin Market" and Mrs. Dalloway.  We had a good discussion about the similarities in the works and the differences.  One group also included Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" for similar reasons.  That group's fifth work was "Porphyria's Lover," which led to a great discussion of new ways of telling stories and creating characters, like the dramatic monologue--new ways which are as old as literature, in many ways.  

The other group chose Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, which made me happy and led to a conversation about women's lives and ordinary lives being seen as important--links to Mrs. Dalloway.  The other group also chose Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," mainly for ways it shows the way the past affects the present--good insights that the student who advocated for it came up with on his own.

We also talked about works that we didn't cover deeply or much at all, and what might be included next time.  One of my students suggested Jane Austen, and I said that I had also been thinking about adding Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.  I also mentioned that Sense and Sensibility is coming back to the big screen for one day only and recommended it.  I may have waxed too enthusiastic about Emma Thompson, saying, "If Emma Thompson came through that door right now and said, 'Come away with me right now, and we'll make wonderful movies,' I would leave without a second thought.  Would I go get my purse?  Yes, probably."  And then we talked about big name British actors of the 1990's for a few minutes, and then I turned our attention back again to the work of the course.

I feel very lucky to be teaching this next generation of students at Spartanburg Methodist College.  They give me hope for the future.  They have a wide range of interests:  I'm thinking about my Brit Lit students who had a great conversation about musical theatre when I asked them about the direction of theater after "Waiting for Godot."  They've been good sports about my cell phones in class ban.  They're respectful, even as they question what the larger world wants them to believe.  

I've got one more class day, today, wrapping up three classes, and then it's on to Thanksgiving and exams.  I don't need to report to campus for exams, another aspect of life that makes me feel very lucky.  So much gratitude here in this week as we dash to Thanksgiving and beyond!