Light

Today feels heavy.  Dark clouds hang in the eastern sky, and the prediction is for rain and snow in Boulder over the next two days.  My students have been restless, edgy.  Spring break gave them a taste of freedom, and now they're back in these plastic chairs, trapped for hours in these square rooms, told to open their notebooks, get out their pencils, pay attention, engage now.  I stand in front of them and conduct a fun economics game that most of them seem to enjoy, but I keep drifting to the hours M. and TK and I spent driving through the red dust of the southwest, all that open space in my mind.

Today is heavy because eleven educators were convicted of racketeering in Atlanta and sent to prison.  They look familiar to me:  the stooped shoulders of people who work for too many hours for too little pay.  They've stood in classrooms in front of too many students.  What they did was wrong, of course.  But I recognize them as my colleagues.  And as victims of an enormous system that coerced at least 178 people into cheating.  The science fiction I'm writing doesn't seem too distant, if the testing culture is pushing entire school districts to these extremes.  Educators as criminals.  What's next?  Educators as superfluous?  I thought to look up a piece of satire I published as a 28-year-old grad student ten years ago -- "A Modest Proposal for Our Schools" -- and was shocked to find it's even more relevant today.

Today is heavy because Arkansas wants to pass similar "religious freedom" laws to the ones recently passed in Indiana.  In how many states will I -- and my family -- be declared unwelcome?

Today is heavy because I got the fifth rejection letter I've received in two days.  Yesterday, Room magazine wrote that they "regret to inform me" that they did not want my fiction or my creative non-fiction pieces.  And today, The Orlando Prize emailed that there was too much greatness in the submissions for spring; my essay and my flash fiction were "just not for them".  Fence thanked me for patiently waiting a year for their decision about their 2014 book prize, but I had not been chosen.

Sigh.  M. teases me when I write out "sigh", or when I say the word aloud to accompany the sound.  Thinking about that, and the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases me, makes me smile.  And TK's excitement today about April Fool's made me smile.  And a few future possibilities I'm leaning toward.  And the way it felt to write all day yesterday at a coffee shop, acoustic guitar music in my ears.  And the plain M&Ms my friend Dede thinks to send me every single holiday because she knows they make me happy.  And the memory of Arches, that red-brown rock, the secret silences.  And the fact that it's Thursday tomorrow, and I know my students will love comparing Russian and American Cold War propaganda.  And the fact that I just beat M. at Scrabble.  And my niece and her round cheeks and the way she says "I don' know!", and my baby nephew with his voluminous wild hair and his fascination with his fingers. And my sister's laugh.  And the way TK murmurs in her sleep sometimes, like she did just now.  And my dad's happiness to be out on the trails again, stopping on a bridge to search for an American Dipper.  And the letters my mom and I write each other on Sundays now, like she and Gram used to do. And June, which I've always loved for its possibilities.

Days aren't heavy like they used to be.  I spent almost two years in the darkness, and now it's Easter, all deep plant roots and first crocus blooms and light breaking in, all the pagan fertility and whispered joy.  A light shines in the darkness.  NPR is playing the news about Israel and Palestine, and TK says, "Could you turn that off so we can be happy together?" and I do, because she's right.  I want to be responsible and learn as much as I can about the Iran nuclear negotiations and the ongoing search for fairness in Ferguson, but I also I want to make sure I keep a view of the light.

I'm here.  In Gram's green chair, with a view of the bright yellow happy wooden star that used to hang in a doorway at Gram's house.  My apartment is quiet; I've spent the evening reading The New Yorker; I'm about to write another chapter of my novel.  A sweet, smart, beautiful little girl is sleeping just down the hall.  Tomorrow, M. says, she'll be here after school, and she'll take care of dinner and hug me when I come home.  It might rain all day tomorrow, but we can have warm brownies and ice cream and watch Bette Midler's Hocus Pocus, and Fable the dog will stretch out beside us and close his eyes because his pack is all accounted for.

The message emerging in the science fiction novel I'm writing is this:  connect to humans. Turn off the devices; hold someone's hand; watch the clouds change in the sky. It won't fix everything, but it will make everything a little easier.  A little lighter.