Room 408

By the end of the week I am as young as they are. I need a soothing voice. I need to slouch and not exist for a while. On the ferry to the peninsula, Alfred reads to me, and I close my eyes. When he tires of my inattentiveness, he thumbs the pages and I nuzzle myself into the soft sound that the book makes. I fidget and whine, push my head into the cumulous folds of his vest like a child. Only the possibility of identifying new birds rouses me, but each one -- black with white ... no, dusky gray with a long red -- slips from my sight. The boat speeds across the sound, and these birds are divers playing games with me. If I could just hold on to one of them long enough . . . but it has been like this all week. Tart and sour orange leaves that I drive past. Amber quaking aspen leaves that tap me on the shoulder as I disappear into the school's brick mass. The gold flecks of light in the windows of houses waking slowly on the hills of Fremont, and the lake as it is unveiled by thick, morning fog -- these images I can see as I pace the floor of room 408, my new classroom, giving instructions or reading aloud. Later today, I say. The sun ... please let it be out when I leave this place. Please let me leave without more to do so I can walk with this beauty. But at home, my mind is still full of things to write down and worksheets to type or grade. The trees are now only half full, and so as I gaze out at the russet-tinted water of Portage Bay, I rest my mind on what beauty I can find repose in. For now, I have the tall windows in my classroom and the majestic hemlock right outside that they frame, and I have my students . . . my students who are as eager as I am to be distracted by creatures who live other lives, lives much less productive than ours. For me it is the surf scoters I saw today for the first time. For them, it is the squirrels who live and play and chase each other carelessly in the hemlock's winding boughs. My students. I will be grateful this week for their distractions.