On teaching. I am a teacher. But I no longer have a classroom (more on that later). After eleven and a half years of pouring information, humor, wisdom, worldview, and a healthy dose of mothering into young minds, I find myself both at a loss and at a threshold—where to go from here.
Right now here is with my aunt. She can now longer stay on her own. Here is also near my daughter and her family which affords me the opportunity not only to get to know her again, but to spend precious time with my granddaughter. Here is along way away from home though, and I miss my best friend terribly. I get home twice a year at least and Verizon is making no money off our “in family” phone plan. For now, however, here is where I need to be, and that is clear.

How to make the most of my time here is another question--one that I hope I will be able to answer by writing. It is what I have dreamed of doing but hated to stop long enough to put thoughts and ideas to paper. I have no excuse now because “here” comes with a great deal of time. I have time to study, time to exercise, time to read, time to pray, time to talk on the phone and all this on top of keeping house, fixing things, cleaning things, cooking, shopping, babysitting, going to doctor’s appointments and therapy. There is time to listen to endless talk shows and to read the newspaper every day. All this and get eight or ten hours of sleep a night. A teacher never had it so good. The only problem is I have no students. So pencil and paper or computer and keyboard will be my classroom and where as before I had a captive audience now I will have to capture one. But perhaps some of the things that made me a good teacher will help me become a good writer.

Now see I have written one paragraph and I am ready to call it a night. It takes a long time to put words on paper. I have to wonder if I have the tenacity. But I feel I must. I know what I do all day is important, but it does not feel like accomplishment. It feels like it lacks achievement and I have always been an overachiever.

So here is my first obsession put to rest. Four dollar a gallon gasoline. How are we going to survive this. Why won’t our politicians see that this is going to destroy our country if we are not allowed to find and develop energy here and do it now. I am going to buy the most expensive recumbent bicycle I can find. I believe that to survive we are going to have to park our cars and get places under our own power. Driving is going to become something we only do when we absolutely must.

Here is another one. I live in a trailer park on a lot that barely sustains grass. How could I possibly feed us “off the land” if it really came to that? I will have to ride my bicycle into town to my daughter’s house or her in-laws and help them put in a massive garden and hope to be able to feed three families off out of it. And I will need a shotgun to shoot these fat squirrels that have the run of the park. Only thing is that, this state has some crazy gun laws, and I don’t even know if I can get a gun.
Okay that’s an hour for the first night. A three hundred page novel should only take about five years.