Writing Up A Storm

The Story Time Rug

This is my grandmother's rug. When my sweet little grandmother died, I was given many pieces of her furniture, kitchenware, bedding, and rugs. I was about 22 years old, living in Austin, beginning a master's degree in creative writing. And so this rug began a very long journey with me. It was a very old rug when I acquired it, and I have added some 45 years to it myself.

This rug was the story time rug in my classroom for all the years that I taught. A row of children could sit across the front, across the middle, and across the back, or everyone could just crowd together on top of it. It was just big enough to hold a class of small children.

If rugs could talk, what stories they would tell!

I will tell you one story from that very first winter when I was 22. I was sharing a rent house with other students when a young couple (whom someone knew by way of someone else) came seeking a place to stay for the night.

They were about 19 years old. He was an aspiring film student. She was working as a waitress. And she was pregnant. It was winter. There was no room in the inn.

We also had no room except for the floor of the living room. But we did have an extra mattress which we laid down on top of my grandmother's rug, and I had extra sheets and a blanket for them. 

I heard the girl return after midnight from her job. She had only made a handful of change, which she let tip out of her pocket. I could hear the coins fall in a silvery tintinnabulation, all over the wooden floorboards.

Oh, she was in such despair, so scared! Not enough money, no home, and pregnant. We could hear her crying and him softly trying to calm her. Then silence all over the house. In the middle of the night, the temperature dropped to way below freezing.

The house was icy-cold in the early morning dark when I tiptoed through the hallway to light the bathroom heater. That's when I saw them through the french doors that opened into the living room. During the night, for want of more blankets (poor things!) they had pulled my grandmother's rug on top of them and were fast asleep beneath its magic-carpet weight.

I never saw them again. I don't know what happened to them. But they live forever in my memory, a deep-winter vignette, with woven threads of red and blue and chimes of tiny coins.

And here is Tatiana again. I have added her little red purse. She is one of the children who sat upon my grandmother's rug for story time. Looking at her now, I love how (all unintentionally) her purse matches the red in that rug.

And I love putting its strap over her shoulder and flinging that little purse into the universe, watching it whirl in its orbit round about her.

.

A Woman in a Kerchief Carrying a Pail

A woman in a kerchief carrying a pail! I almost missed her. I was so taken with the child-like colors and shapes in this painting that I didn't see the woman walking into the picture from the far left.

This painting is by Margret Hofheinz-Döring (1910–1994). Many of her paintings have been donated to the public domain by Margret Hofheinz-Döring/ Galerie Brigitte Mauch Göppingen. What a lovely gift to the world! This one is titled "Alpine Pasture" ("Auf der Alm"). I am surprised to see what look like longhorn cattle here. But then the word "alpine" makes me think of Heidi and goats, instead of cattle.

I found Margret because I love Wendell Berry's poem about the "peace of the wild things" and was looking through WikiCommons for paintings of wild things. Suddenly here was this painting and this artist I had never heard of before. She created 9,000 works of art in her lifetime. I am so in awe of this. She makes me want to jump up this very minute and start working at my art table.

I have the great good fortune to have a room of my own. My husband and I live in a 1929 fixer-upper bungalow, with two little bedrooms and two baths (which is a luxury of luxuries). Since the garage is his workroom, I got the smaller of the two bedrooms for my own. We call it the boxroom because, when we first moved in, everything in boxes went into it. And it is still full of boxes. But I like its cozy crowded cluttered comfiness.

Here is another of Margret's paintings, titled "Children" ("Kindergarten"). I love the colors, the children holding hands (perhaps), the overall child-like look of this, but what I particularly love is that she has painted right onto the frame. She simply kept on going. I picture her painting right off the frame and onto the floorboards, out her front door, down the street, into the big world.

I know her work is very deceptively simple, but, because of that, it makes me feel that I could paint like that, too! This one looks like finger painting, doesn't it? Last summer I bought some sticks of Crayola modeling clay and let myself just play with it, making shapes, mixing the colors, turning red and blue into purple. Hmmmmmm. Now I'm thinking of getting some finger paints . . .

Here is my art table this morning, about 4 o'clock, in the early morning dark that I love so much. A clutter of tissue paper, my sketch of Tatiana from yesterday's post (I enlarged the pencil drawing 150%), my scissors, and some see-through flowered fabric, which I would love to use for her skirt or her top, but I'm afraid the flowers in the pattern are too large or she is too small.

This is what my table looks like most of the time. Worse, actually. I removed the newspaper, the jar of coffee (to remind me to buy more), the folder, the notebook, the to-do list, the empty candle box, etc. etc.

Someone gave me this roll of tissue paper, all swiss-dots, many colors. I'm shamed to say I've had it for years, and I no longer remember who the dear person was who gave it to me. I've been saving it. I think it is time I used it!

 

And here is my first try at creating Tatiana out of paper. Her hair and boots are Canson art paper, and I made her top and skirt out of the tissue paper.

It always amazes me how such tiny fragments can trick the eye into seeing more than is really there!

.

Edited to add for Mendofleur, the words to Wendell Berry's poem:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Follow Your Star, Tatiana!

Another booted lady! I designed this card shortly after I designed the one from yesterday's post. And then I began to design a whole troop of booted ladies striding fearlessly into their destinies, and I have never really stopped making variations on this theme.  My booted lady walked right into my banner last summer at the very top of this little blog, as if she had a right to be there!

And I'll probably be circling around the idea of "following your star" for the rest of my life, too, trying to come up with different ways of making a pictorial representation of the phrase. In this one, I began with the hat on her head and the star at the end of a long pole in her hand, as in my banner, but then I thought, no, the star should be closer, more a part of her, maybe dangling right before her face so she can see it. And that's how the star ended up dangling from her hat.

I wasn't thinking about Minnie Pearl at the time, but I am now, and smiling at my memory of seeing Minnie Pearl in her extravagant flowered hats with her trademark $1.98 price tag dangling from the brim.

But the reason I am featuring this design today is not because of the hat. It's because of the purse.

Here is a close up of the purse and the apron. Oh, but wait! I do have to digress here for just a moment. That material in both purse and apron is just cotton calico, but this enlargement makes it seem almost like burlap, and the fringe is like the fringe on a rug weaving. I really like seeing the individual threads of this machine-made cloth, for it almost looks hand-woven. And I particularly love the addition of the dots of color in the apron. I wonder if the person who designed this felt a mischievous joy in sprinkling those colorful polka dots all over this fabric?

But back to the purse.

I'm pretty much a backpack-type person myself, but I love to see women, and especially little girls, with their purses. I had a little third-grader whom I will call Tatiana, not quite her name but close enough. She was a tiny little doll of a girl, of both Hispanic and Chinese heritage, the smallest child in our class that year. And she had a tiny little purse on a very long strap.

Here is a little sketch I made of Tatiana in preparation for maybe, maybe, creating her out of fabric and paper. She wore the most amazing little outfits, out of fabrics as soft as flower petals, tiny midriffs with tiny skirts. Her skirts were little circlets of silk, like silken ballet tutus. With boots on her feet.

And her purse! Her bright poppy-red purse, which was as tiny as bar of soap, was exactly like a soap-on-a-rope, and it flew all around her everywhere she went, in orbit.

I find that I now love to take one of my fabric-paper ladies, throw a long strap over one arm or across a shoulder, and let that purse fly into orbit around them, too.

I don't have a soap-on-a-rope to show you, but here is a Victorian Bouquet Luxury Soap (in a red bag) on an improvised red rope, just to give you the idea. This is very reminiscent of Tatiana's bright red miniature purse. People used to sell soaps-on-a-rope for stocking stuffers. I don't know if they still do or not.

But Tatiana comes to my mind so very much today for more than just her purse.

She was one of my third-graders who was not yet reading, and I cannot help but be in awe of her, and of all children like her, for she came dancing into my classroom, day after day, knowing that she could not do this mysterious thing that most of the other kids were doing like magic, but she never once lost her faith that somehow she would be okay.

Where do these little ones get this kind of courage?

I would find her peeking into her tiny red purse every now and then, just gazing lovingly at its contents. Perhaps she kept a handful of extra courage inside that little purse. Oh, I would love to sit beside her one more time and peek into her purse with her!

 

Wherever you are, keep following your star, Tatiana!

.

The Pumpkin That Never Was

Eighteen years ago I tried to grow pumpkins for my class. I started my pumpkin project in my own backyard in the summertime long before school started in the fall. Near our back fence, I made four little soil hills in which I planted the seeds and from which came a great tangle of vines. It looked very promising.

However, the great tangle of vines produced only one little yellow flower and not one single pumpkin.

We wrote stories and drew pictures and made books anyway ~ about the pumpkin that never was. This is all that remains of the cover to one of our pumpkin books. Beneath the lamination, you can see the actual vine itself.

I took it to class and we studied it at great length. It was a lovely leafy green, and the flower (lower right-hand quadrant of the cover) was a deep dusty yellow.

Here is a closer view of the little flower. You can just barely make out the faint yellow-brown tint that is left in the petals, petals that were once open, but by the time of lamination, had closed up like a little yellow rosebud.

In a few more years, perhaps, the yellow of the flower and the green of the vine will have become one and the same sepia brown.

I have lost almost everything of my students' work, but I have a few of their drawings of our pumpkin vine. These were the covers for their very scientific descriptions of the vine. (We were studying descriptive writing at the time.)

I love how each cover is different even though you can tell there was an overall direction to make a frame, draw the vine, and include a title and their name. But what I especially love is that you can see that they were working on these together as a class, borrowing ideas from each other. I can see them wandering around the room to see what everyone else was doing, going up to the vine to take a closer look, and then returning to bend over their own work again.

I've been studying these old pictures, and I think now we must have done a brown-crayon frame together as a class, to get them started. Each child has drawn a single-line, brown-crayon frame around the perimeter of the page. Then some of the children decorated the outside edge of the frame and some of them didn't.

This one reminds me of all the times I have misjudged the amount of space it will take me to write something that I fully intended to be centered. I love how Samuel kept on going across the line of the frame to get that fine "e" in place.

And here Shannon sets great bands of colors around an interior that she leaves daringly blank. I love her little yellow-orange flower right in the center at the bottom. I am wondering now if the vine was displayed at the front of the room for them to copy with the little flower in the middle somewhere, for they have all drawn the vine and flower in a very similar way.

And I love Cynthia's title: "The old dead flower and the old dead vine." Really, I'm tempted to write a story with that exact same title.

And speaking of stories, I don't know what happened to the stories that they wrote about "The Pumpkin That Never Was." Perhaps it is appropriate that they are lost, along with the pumpkin, vanished into that sacred place where lost things are kept safe, along with all the things that were ever hoped for but never came to pass.

I am quite sure the pumpkin that never was holds court somewhere, as round and as bright as a harvest moon.

.

The Snow Queen: The Plight

Continuing The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen from yesterday, the plight of the story begins when the boy Kay gets a grain of sand from the mirror in his eye and a sliver of the mirror in his heart, and everything good and beautiful in the world appears poor and mean to him, and vice versa. He turns his back on his friends and runs after the Snow Queen, for she seems beautiful to him. And, yes, how very beautiful she is in her snowy sledge and her clouds of snowy robes!

I love how these old fairy tales delve into the depths of the human condition. They never pretend that the world is a safe place. Some of them challenge the deepest realms of psychological interpretations. I would imagine that The Snow Queen would be a treasure-trove for many a dissertation.

At first Kay attaches his little sledge to the Snow Queen's much larger sledge, and, later, when he tries to get away, it is too late. She has captured him. In my lifetime I have seen many a person, including myself, fall into the clutches of choices that take them way too far off the beaten path, and sometimes they never find their way back again.

Here is the exact moment when Kay latches on to her sledge. How powerful this fairy tale is!

When I was teaching, I felt that every child in my class was as vulnerable as little Kay. The interior of a classroom is so safe. Fifteen or twenty children all sitting cross-legged on the rug for story time, surrounded by all the trappings of an elementary school classroom: chalk and crayons and lined paper and readers and little desks with little chairs behind each one, bulletin boards crowded with children's drawings and children's handwriting. And then, at the end of the day, you let all the children out your door into the big wide world.

Most of my students came from two large housing projects that surrounded our school on both sides. When I made home visits, I marveled to myself that the only reason in the world that I felt safe walking into these projects was because I was holding the hand of a little six-year-old child. If I had been alone, I would have been terrified inside those dark mazes.

I remember having the idea, when I was about six years old, that kidnappers drove around in a truck. The truck, I was sure, said "Kidnappers" in large letters on the side, so you could see it coming for you and get away in time. If I had grown up where it snowed, perhaps I would have imagined a very large sledge instead.

But The Snow Queen, to my way of thinking, is not about stranger-danger. I was not afraid that my students would be kidnapped before they got home. I was afraid that they would attach their lives to the allure of the drugs and the gangs that lived everywhere around them, that they would drop out and disappear, and that all the Gerdas in the world would never be able to find them or rescue them.

Every story needs a beginning and then a problem. The Snow Queen gives us our problem when Kay disappears into thin air, and only little Gerda believes he can be found.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Pursuit

.

Crayon Similes & the Hole to China, Part 2

[Note: Dear Reader, in order to understand today's post, you will need to read yesterday's post first.]

On the third day of my "crayon simile" lesson, I needed to set the bar a little higher for the class. I erased both chalkboards, and asked them to write a description of our classroom, using at least three color similes. They could use their crayons if they wanted to.

But I knew that Jewel needed some kind of special magic.

Jewel's birthday was in the summer, and there had hardly been one day since school started that she had not asked me when, exactly, were we going to celebrate her birthday, with that look of glorious expectation that very young children get about their birthdays. She was that kind of little girl. To have her suddenly so upset over this new activity was heart-breaking.

We looked at her paper from the day before. Yes, she wanted the brown dog. We took it off the paper with the hole in it. Jewel patted the dog smooth again. I took out a clean piece of writing paper, but then I saw right away she wasn't ready for that yet. It was as if she had fallen through that hole in her paper from yesterday and was now very far away.

It was not that Jewel was the only one in the class who could not do yesterday's assignment or today's assignment. I needed to be right beside four or five other kids, too, right that minute. But those kids were busy, for the moment, writing descriptions without similes, or drawing pictures without words, or cleaning out their desks. They were not in tears.

Jewel was in tears. Again. The bad day from yesterday had come to school with her today.

Jewel had fallen through the hole in her paper into a very dark place.

I was in the portables so I had the luxury of having a teacher in the adjoining portable who could keep an eye on my class while Jewel and the little brown dog and I went outside.

We sat down on the bottom step of the stairway to the portable and looked at the world. If you haven't thought it about recently, I can assure you there is a great quantity of brown in the world at large. We looked at the paper dog and then we looked at the world so see if we could find a brown out there that would fit into a sentence about her dog:

The dog is as brown as ________ .

We looked at telephone poles, tree trunks, autumn leaves, the wooden steps we were sitting on. But Jewel was having none of it. She picked up a stick (a brown stick, mind you) and began continuing the hole in the paper phenomenon by digging a little hole to China right there in the ground at her feet.

Ever helpful and hopeful, I kept on enumerating brown things: sparrows, pecans, a piece of twine that was hanging from the railing, not realizing that every time I thought of another brown thing I was simply further reducing Jewel's chances of finding one all by herself.

(Honestly, sometimes I need to take myself out into the hall and give myself a good talking to.)

Jewel's hole got deeper and deeper.

I started digging a hole, too. Jewel and I dug in silence for a little tick of time.

And then I got to have that huge once in a lifetime Helen Keller-Anne Sullivan "the word for water is . . ." experience. Suddenly, Jewel lifted up her face to me with a smile brighter than the sun, and slowly unclenched her little fist so that I could see the treasure in the palm of her hand: a handful of dirt from her hole to China.

"Ms. Cates, my dog is as brown as dirt," she said, proudly. And E=mc². Eureka!

I really have no earthly idea of what happened that day, but something bigger than one little simile clicked for Jewel.

A little girl who had no idea of what a simile is came up with one all on her own anyway. And then it was as if doors in her mind that were keeping phonics in one room and reading in another room and writing in another room suddenly began to open up into each other, letting an intermingling take place that hadn't been happening before. Or maybe it was just that a little girl who wasn't ready for third grade summoned up the courage to begin to read and write at her very own pre-primer level anyway.

We went back inside and together we wrote her "dog is as brown as dirt" sentence on the new piece of paper.

But then Jewel started writing instead of drawing in her journal in the mornings, and it was obvious that all those perfectly-copied phonics lessons in her perfect penmanship had been sinking in. Her journal pages almost always started out about a brown dog and then proceeded immediately to her birthday and all her birthday wishes. She never stopped for periods. Like Faulkner, her thoughts went on and on for pages, one long sentence composed of many independent clauses all connected by "and."

Below is a sample from my memory ~ I've probably misquoted her a little:

"The big bron dog jumt on me and it is my brday and I mad a wis for a red dres and a puzl and I had a cak and thr wil be 9 candls on my cak and it is my brday sum day soon."

No child wrote as many pages in her journal as Jewel did from that time forward. No child continued to come to school every day with such a beatific smile. No child ever raised her hand so eagerly to answer questions she did not know the answer to. No child ever asked me so many times when were we going to celebrate her birthday as my sweet little Jewel.

Happy Birthday, Jewel!!

.

Crayon Similes & the Hole to China, Part 1

During one of my teaching years, the writing of color similes led me straight into what I think of as "a digging a hole to China" experience. I would like to tell you what happened.

One September I introduced similes to my third-graders by using crayons. I found this to be a really fun and easy way to get a beginning idea of similes across. We used the 8 colors above that come in both large and regular sizes in 8-color packets of crayons (plus we added white and gray).

Then I brought as many things from home to match the colors as I could. For example, clockwise from the top left are mini-carrots, a potato, a very tiny iron skillet, two broccoli florets, one tomato, three plums, and a lemon.

In the middle is the one lonely blue crayon. I had nothing on hand today that is consistently blue to put with the blue crayon. Blue is a somewhat rare color in the natural world, isn't it?

But I want to tell you about what happened this one particular September when I did my "crayon simile" lesson with my class.

First we brainstormed for everything we could think of that was routinely thought of as red, yellow, brown, or green, etc. I wrote their ideas on the chalkboard, using colored chalk. We had two chalkboards and we filled up both of them. (This one above is a small 9 x 7 inch chalkboard that I have at home.) 

But back to my story.

I had a little girl by the name of Jewel in my class. Jewel was a little gem of a girl. She smiled all day long, jumped headfirst into any project, was always the first to raise her hand even when she didn't know the answer, and, in early September in third grade, she was not yet reading or writing, although she had perfect penmanship and could copy anything ~ letter-perfect.

In the mornings when the class wrote in their journals, Jewel drew pictures in hers.

I showed the children what I wanted them to do: to write down as many similes as they could using the words on the board or making up their own. They could write in crayon or pencil or both. They could draw pictures or cut pictures out of a stack of catalogs and old reading-readiness workbooks that I had at the back of the room.

Most of the words they might need were on the two chalkboards. Because I wanted them to learn about similes, I didn't want their fear of misspelling words to interfere. By third grade, some children are so anxious that each word they put on paper be "right" that they can't go forward with their thoughts if they are unsure of their spelling. I hope children nowadays are able to use creative spelling more easily than when I was teaching.

Jewel's paper looked something like this. Alas, when I was teaching, I sent all their papers home with them, and now I wish I had copies of their work to show you, but I don't. Still, I remember some things with a clarity that sometimes takes my breath away.

Jewel had very much taken to heart the idea that a simile must contain the words "as ______ as a _____" and that it needed a color in the first blank and an object that same color in the second blank. And she had all the words she needed on the chalkboards. She could find the word "Red" on her red crayon, and match it to the word "Red" on the chalkboard, and then find all the words beneath that were red objects. Her page was filled with similes from top to bottom.

But the next day I made it a little harder. 

I asked them to find a picture from the catalogs or workbooks and write one sentence describing the color of their chosen object with a color simile. I gave them an example, like the one above, to show them what I wanted.

There was a big flurry of finding the pictures, pasting them on their papers, and hunching over to write their sentences. The brainstorming words from the day before were still on the chalkboards.

Everyone went to work. Everyone except Jewel.

My sweet little Jewel could not make the leap from yesterday's lesson to today's assignment. Yesterday she had written a whole page of similes. Today she could not write one single simile, partly because she could not write a sentence in which to put it, but also because she could not go from the picture she had chosen of a dog to a simile about the dog.

Jewel had chosen a little brown dog for her picture.

She wrote her name and pasted on her picture and tried to start a sentence. And, bless her little heart, she tried and erased and tried and erased and tried and erased until she had dug a little hole right through her paper.

Then she cradled her little head in her little arms over her paper, in tears.

My sweet sparkling little Jewel was falling down a very deep dark hole. All the way to China.

To be continued tomorrow . . .

.