Tuesday

Apr. 21, 2009


Return I

by Elisabeth Stevens

When I am traveling,
hurrying hundreds of miles
in trains or by car,
I pass houses
where we once lived.

All those places
once seemed permanent, immutable,
part of our marriage, home.
Now they are abandoned stage sets,
insubstantial cardboard and canvas.

Like clothes sent to the thrift shop,
there were lives that we left behind—
just like taking out the garbage,
dropping it in the can,
slamming the lid.

I return as a tourist to
our old lives. Speeding by,
I see our first roof top through
a soot-marked window. I could walk there
from the station. I do not get off the train.

When I have the car,
I park down the block from
another place and keep the motor running.
I see tulips whose bulbs I held,
brown and flaky in my palm.

Without moving,
I cross the lawn like a specter,
ring the bell like a prankster, run away.
The house has been painted
a different color. The swing set is gone.

At the country place, our last,
I stop behind the privet hedge you planted
to see your tree. Set out in September when
you'd measured your last summer's sun,
it now shades the terrace, just as you'd planned.

When you died, I thought of
putting your ashes under your tree.
Instead, the summer after,
I sat out alone in the evenings,
waiting, listening to the leaves.

I still have your car, our child,
the dog, and some of the money.
The cat, the rabbits and the goldfish
are gone. I release the brake.
Driving quickly, I take a familiar road.

I do not see anyone we knew.

"Return I" by Elisabeth Stevens, from Household Words. © Three Conditions Press, 2000. Reprinted with permission.

It's the birthday of the man who invented the concept of kindergarten: Friedrich Froebel, born in a village in Germany (1782). It was a prosperous village, located in a forest that was filled with plants that provided natural herbal remedies for various ailments, and the villagers earned their living from selling those plants in the form of salves, astringents, soaps, and dyes. Friedrich studied study math and botany, worked as a land surveyor, and then became a teacher. He was devoted to early childhood education, and he thought that activity and play were an essential part of early learning. He coined the term kindergarten in 1840. He was one of the first educators to see games as a tool for learning. He said, "Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul."

The first kindergarten in the United Sates was founded in 1856 in Watertown, Wisconsin, by one of Froebel's students.

It's the birthday of Charlotte Brontë, (books by this author) born in Yorkshire, England, in 1816. She wrote Jane Eyre (1847), the story of a poor orphan who finds a job as a governess and eventually falls in love with her mysterious employer. The novel was an immediate success. Within two years of its publication, all of Charlotte's siblings had died. She married in 1854 but died soon after from complications with her pregnancy.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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