Second Semester

A weird week.

One of my kids' teacher's disappeared this week in a hurricane of rumors and an article in the paper yesterday speaking of a just-after-school-arrest for a DUI.  She is a champion long-term teacher, and the whole thing is sad, badly played, and full of whispers.  So that's happening, and a long term sub (who seems lovely).

Then there are the backpack capers: SOMEone is digging through all the backpacks (because remember this is Southern California and all the backpacks hang outside on hooks because pretty much the whole school is outside, including the cafeteria -i.e. picnic tables), and taking library books, wallets, phones, gum, poofy keychains etc.  And five of the packs of gum and one of the wallets somehow surfaced in the bottom of my kid's backpack.  The innocence seems clear, but still, that's happening, and sounds like the middle reader books I'm spending a lot of time with these days.

And the rain storms that now have flooded two of my camping (glamping) trips have blown over; the hills are greener than they'll ever be and bursting with California sunflowers; the air smells like sweet sage; and today the sun's heat felt like summer, which makes me restless and excited and want to buck routine.  So there's that, too.

I'm not a second semester senior (though this weather still stirs that), but I am in a second semester -- second semester of the move.  First semester was so many big feelings -- other people's -- that I held and hauled because I had to or just did, and it was exhausting.  There was so much *action* to help the kids, all of us, connect and settle.  And they did -- somehow post-Christmas, they came "home" and settled.  Now, it seems, the second semester is mine.

It's funny how when you're stripped of who you were and what you knew, even if you return to a familiar and beloved place, the ground shifts.

First it was all a balancing act on that shaky ground.  But now the movement's settled and it's looking at what's been unearthed -- a kind of treasure hunt.  There are all these tiny green sprouts, maybe an internal reflection of the spring breaking through back east.  You know when you buy a new house and spend your first spring there, you have no idea what's about to poke through the earth and surround you with blooms?  I feel like that -- walking the yard, bending down to see the green nosing up.  What will come? I keep watching.