Part of the beauty of the open prairie is being able to see for miles with an unobstructed view. I can look out the window of the second story of my house and see the lights of Bismarck, which is thirty miles away. Part of the bane of the open prairie is when there is snow present and the wind blows, (which is pretty often in North Dakota), it creates a condition called a ground blizzard, meaning it doesn't have to be snowing to have blizzard-like conditions.
This morning was typical for January and conditions warranted having the buses head out an hour late in order to run in daylight hours. The main highways are generally well-maintained, but there are an impossible amount of gravel roads that do not see the snowplow for hours or days at a time. They can become drifted in in a very short amount of time.
An hour late doesn't sound like a big deal, but schedule-wise, it is the proverbial wrench in the works. Our elementary school has set-in-stone bands for reading and math, and reading intervention, so an hour late meant our reading hour was robbed, reading intervention blasted out of the water, and math was late getting started. It seemed that I spent the entire day trying to play catch-up.
Plus, I'm really tired. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. I don't think it's just because of my hectic days and short nights of sleep in the last couple of weeks. I've been coping with a crazy-busy schedule for a year-and-a-half (during one intense week of classes I only got 15 hours of sleep in a 4 day period. Yikes!). No, I think this level of tired comes from finally beginning to relax after such an extended period of living on adrenaline and caffeine. I could do it better when I was in my 20's. My middle-aged body really wants more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night, and I have been forcing it to live on that kind of sleep deprivation for way too long. Now that I no longer have the mill stone of course work hanging around my neck, I think I just need some catch-up sleep and re-learning how to relax (another thing in short supply in my life). Unbelievably, I haven't been sick since I went back to college, for which I have been deeply grateful.
Back to my Friday. As we wrapped up our first week together, my students created a mural of themselves in our classroom. It is completely adorable. I was blown away by the minute detail they added and was touched by the stick figure drawing of one student hugging me (so glad he represented me as a stick figure instead of round circles :) This same student tugs at my heart anyway in that almost exactly one year ago, his mother was killed in a car accident. Her funeral was held on his 6th birthday. He told me yesterday that he thinks about his mother every time he plays with his neighbor. "Why is that?" I asked him. "Because she tells me every time I play with her that I can't talk about my mother." Sitting in front of me sat a bruised, bleeding heart wrapped in a seven-year-old body. I assured him he could talk about her to me anytime he wanted to. My mother's heart longs to tuck him in the safe folds of my love and protect him from the storms of life. But my role as teacher has limitations, of course, and I will have to do my best to be nurturing and be a safe harbor for him, while fulfilling my role as educator in his young life. The best I can hope for is to make a positive difference. My prayer is that he will leave my classroom in four months knowing that I will always be in his corner.
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