Snow

Happy New Year. I am back at work now, after a snowstorm. The snowstorm extended my school’s winter break by two days. Before today, it had been three and a half weeks since I taught a class, and just over three weeks since I was in the building.

The break was long enough for me to forget about teaching, basically, even though part of what I did over the break was to carry around five pounds of paper midterm exams, which I sorted into piles and occasionally got out and graded. But that was whatever. I didn’t think about teaching. Its joys and its problems didn’t enter into my mind. I did not worry about what I would teach tomorrow or the next day, and I did not remember what happened in the classroom yesterday, not to feel agitated, or amused, or proud, or to wonder what I could have done better. It pains me a little bit to report that I didn’t miss teaching at all. It felt so great to be a different kind of person for a while.

I haven’t written in this newsletter for some time now. One of the reasons is that I have been working steadily since last August on a different writing project, something I started years ago and which I put away through the pandemic time and the divorce time. This fall, I have found it in myself to get up early and work on that piece of writing most Thursday, Friday, and Saturday mornings.

While finding my way back to a regular writing practice is one of the things I am most glad about from 2024, I also miss writing here—even today, when I feel a long ways away from having anything charming to say about the teaching life. In 2025, I hope I can find a way to keep going with both.

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The snowstorm dumped about five inches of snow on Baltimore, and maybe that’s even being generous. But the ground was cold when it fell, and nothing melted. School got canceled around dinnertime on Sunday, a luxurious touch: we didn’t have to lay out the school uniforms, or set the alarm for six.

On Sunday afternoon, my kids had their friends over to play. Their babysitter came and, as the four children were entertaining each other, she spent most of her time talking to me. Reader, it was worth it. I took a nice walk around the neighborhood and looked at the skies, trying to discern whether or not that sky was capable of delivering school-negating amounts of snow, as predicted. I couldn’t tell. I made a pizza dinner and we got the good news.

On Monday, we watched a fair bit of TV and then suited up and walked over to the same friends’ house, where we rolled around in communal splendor until after lunch, with a trip outside for some low-stakes sledding. The babysitter came again, and then a friend came for dinner. The kids watched Wicked and my daughter asked us repeatedly to keep our chatty adult voices down.

And then school was canceled on Tuesday. Things became a blur, which is what winter break had already made them: the kids were with me over Christmas this year, and with one three-day break it’s been a kid mega-thon since December 22. A week in Virginia with my sister and her family. The cousins. It was a fucking idyll.

I missed the kids last Thursday through Saturday, when they were back with their dad; I felt tension, like small cars were being crushed down for scrap metal in my chest. Part of that was because I was using those days to prepare myself to teach again (ergo, experiencing three weeks’ worth of Sunday scaries at once), but part of it is surely that I’d gotten used to the way things were, day after day: used to being part of a pack, used to the blur itself. The more we’re all together, the more that’s what I want.

Logically, I felt ready to go back to work today, but while I was in there, the sensation wasn’t the best. I know we will all get back into the swing of things. For now, I am trying to enjoy the awake-ness produced by all these small disruptions, here at the beginning of the year.