At the end of the day. . .

At the end of the day. . .There has to be a song out there that starts with that line. It sounds like a song from my childhood but I don't know which one or if it ever existed. Bea jumped into her first day of school with penache and confidence; when I dropped her off she touched my pants leg and then disappeared into a cluster of children, and when I picked her up she raised her chin in the plucky way she has and announced: "I didn't cry!" Later she explained that some kids cried, but she didn't, and then she sang the Eency Weency Spider for me.

And so it happened that for the first time in our family's history, three children were at school at the same time. So, too, were Martin and I at school. We even ate an early lunch together in the department's conference room and as I ate my pbj and peeled my banana, it did indeed feel like the long old days of school.

My writing is clunky today. I can hear it rattling out of me in fits and starts, like a car running out of gas. This morning in class we listened to NPR's Sounds of Summer Summary--which basically consists of quintessential summer sounds (clink of ice in a glass, a lawn mower, the whine of a mosquito, the cheers of a Little League game. . .). I asked the students to pick a sound and write about a memory it sparked for them. I picked the mosquito and sat down to write, but getting words down on the page was as awful and hard as wringing water out of a rock. Some days are like that, I guess.

I've been reading more lately, which is lovely and may account for the fact that my writing has partly dried up for a while. I find that when I am deeply in a story, I can't focus my mind and my imagination elsewhere. I have to finish the book, shake my head vigorously a few times, and refocus on another story--hopefully the one I will write when I finish rereading "Flame Trees of Thika." I don't know how many times I've read Elspeth Huxley's childhood memoir, but I am enjoying it this time as if I never encountered it before. I assigned the book for class and I am cramming the margins with pencil marks and underlining especially wonderful lines and I know I will never be able to read this particular copy again unless I erase all my marks. I intensely dislike reading books covered with another person's scribbles; it feels as if someone is reading over my shoulder. However, reading a book closely in order to teach it requires that I form a more dynamic relationship with the characters and the richness of the text.

Oh, my heavens. I just reread the paragraph above and hey--do you think I could run on more sentences than I just did?

Better stop while I'm ahead, people. Back to Elspeth (who is my daughter's namesake, of course), back to Kenya's colonial days with its charming, philandering English colonials who seem better than the horrible colonials who beat their servants. Back to Kikuyu myths, to pet chameleons, to coffee bushes.