Back To School

There they go again. Lunches and backpacks for their drop out of the mother ship. And there goes a daughter in a new dress and a son up before the dawn. The last one lines up with her new class. And we go about our daily routine. Another day but it does mark summers end doesn't it even though summer goes to the twenty first of September. And even on the bike ride you can hear the corn rustling now and the air has the dry feel of empty husks..the smell of harvest.

And we turn into another year while they greet new schoolmates and renew old friendships. The new teacher could be good or bad. The new desk is something to get used too and summer still yawns out that slit window open to the returning heat. Because summer does come back on the first day of school. It is part of the ritual. A cool summer then blazing heat for those first months of children stuck inside cinder block forts. If only the heat had come earlier.

And you think of all the things you wanted to do with your kids. You did some of them. Went to a ballgame. The pool. Vacation. But you worked a lot and you wonder if you should have spent more time with them while they were home. Because they are not now. They have left like the soon departing summer... and autumn is closing in.

The Pitcher...what a mom won't do for her sons dream

 

School and the Agrarian Cycle

Used to be kids went home to the farm to help with the harvest. Planting and then harvesting and then back to school. And yet we no longer have any type of Agrarian Cycle at all. We just have the grocery store and the belief that summer is for kids to be off school and fall is for the return of school. My whole life up until I was twenty four was governed by this cycle. June was for going home and leaving the cinder blocked incarceration of dusty erasers and lead pencils and the smell of mimeographed sheets.

Summer was to go on forever. In June there is no belief that fall will come. School will not resume. There will only be summer forever. And the empty school lot proved the point. The teachers had all disappeared too and the school stood empty with the flag pole rope flapping for no one. Only the janitor was still there and I would ride by on my bike and see him there smoking a cigarette out by the back door. The last remaining soldier.

But the fall did come back and suddenly we were back in the classroom .And so it still is. Next week all the kids will return and the adults will continue their same day in day out routine. And the kids will begin their cycle again until one day they too will leave for good. And they may stare out the window and sigh as the last days of summer expire on the hot pavement and think they will be lucky one day to be free of the old Agrarian cycle.

Never knowing how lucky they are to be on that old clock.

The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have