Peonies in the Kitchen During Finals Week

Three weeks ago, as I was entering finals week at Parkland College, where I teach English and Humanities, I turned to flowers to ground me. Marilyn, my spouse, had planted a new peony bush in front of our two older ones. The new bush had two deep crimson blooms, and they were already opening when the old plants’ pink buds were still tightly closed. I cut those two flowers and placed them in a vase on the kitchen counter, where I saw them every time I looked up from grading papers. 

That week, in addition to the usual grading marathon, I was also saying goodbye to students to whom I had grown attached. My classes had become genuine communities; students chatted with each other instead of staring at their devices before, during, and after class, and we often laughed together. I had grown to love them and often been inspired by them, these students who came from so many different places: a night-shift at the hospital, thirteen years in the army, successful treatment for depression, a mental-health break from the U of I, a job lifting boxes for UPS. The semester was ending, and they were moving on: one transferring to Columbia College in Chicago, another to the University of Missouri, most returning in the fall for more classes—but not to our class. Our communities were temporary by definition. 

I was exhausted, ready for summer, and I was also sad to be saying goodbye. 

That week, I found myself checking in with the peonies each day, burying my nose in the petals, inhaling their fragrance, and taking photos. As the week went on, the peonies opened fully, then started to lose their petals. Eventually, the fallen petals dried up in a small pile around the base of the vase. But I wasn’t ready to let the flowers go. Finally, a couple of days after I had submitted grades and the semester was officially over, when Marilyn asked me yet again whether I was done with those peonies, I said yes. I photographed the dried petals; even at that stage, the peonies were beautiful, and then I said goodbye. 

 

Two of my South Asian Cultures (HUM 109) students working on a rangoli together in class. Rain kept us indoors, but a sense of discovery and play filled the room. These two students had not worked together before. Their creative collaboration was typical of that class.

[I read this reflection during the annual Flower Communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign on Sunday, June 2, 2019.]

Reflections after the polar vortex

Last weekend, after the polar vortex had left and the thaw came to our flatland, Marilyn and I went for a walk in Meadowbrook Park. For weeks, the snow and ice had kept us away. But on Sunday afternoon, with the sun out and temperatures in the fifties, the walking paths were busy with runners, strollers, children exploring—“Come down here, Mom!” one boy called from the edge of the brook. “It’s wonderful!”—all of us glad to be moving, to be outside, to be breathing without seeing our breaths.

Almost all the snow had melted, leaving puddles across the paths where the water had nowhere to drain.

I found myself looking down instead of up, seeing the landscape reflected, inverted, in the water. Bare trees and white clouds below me instead of above—a kind of magic. The landscape new again.

A Gentle Reminder

Recently, at the start of a busy day, I went out to the back garden. Marilyn had asked me to take a photo of the zinnias she had planted from seed. 

"They are taller than I am!" she had said. 

I wandered in the backyard, watching butterflies among the zinnias, then strolling to the cannas by the peace pole. These tall, red, blooms came from our friend Jen's garden. In the same bed is a sedum from a neighbor and a hydrangea that was a gift in memory of Marilyn's brother Mo. 

After a few minutes, I went back in the house and began an eleven-hour day of helping students with papers, attending meetings, preparing a workshop, and planning classes for the next day. 

All through the day, though, my mind would rest now and then on a monarch butterfly alighting on a zinnia, the sun on the flowers, the green of the grass. 

These images were gifts, arriving unexpectedly now and then and refreshing me--making me think of a poem I memorized in the sixth grade, back in India: William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," his meditation on daffodils. The poem ends, 

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The stroll in the garden reminded me that being outside and being really present for even a few minutes in the morning could provide a respite from busyness later in the day, the memory of those moments quietly and unexpectedly bringing beauty. 

Why march?

After a week at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, I joined the Families Belong Together march in Iowa City before driving home. On Saturday morning, the ‘heat dome’ was still firmly in place as the crowd gathered behind the Old Capitol, and I wished I had brought a towel with me; I was drenched with sweat before the march even began. I knew I had to march; I had to do something. Contacting my representatives was clearly not enough. 

I have been marching since the 1992 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., when hundreds of thousands of women gathered to speak up for reproductive freedom. Feeling solidarity with others and speaking out have always been energizing. 

Still, last Saturday morning, I wondered if marching would make any difference. Sure, the turnout was large, and the signs were clever, moving, angry, funny. We marched through town, past the Farmers’ Market, where a band played “This Land is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome” and cheered on the marchers. 

But, in our current political climate, would this protest do any good beyond making us feel good about ourselves? On my drive home past rolling fields of corn and across the Mississippi River, I wondered.  

The march began behind the Old Capitol. 

Eventually, I turned on the radio. On This American Life, I heard an attorney describe the excruciating process of getting information for her client, a father separated from his twelve-year-old daughter. On All Things Considered, I heard reports from marches all around the country. 

And I imagined the alternative. What if we had all been silent instead? What if the streets had been empty and quiet, everyone sheltering in the hum of air conditioning? Continuing to tune out the injustices that have gone on so long? What if the press had no resistance to report? The idea was chilling. 

We still have the right to assemble, to speak out, to hold our government accountable. The press still has the right to report on these events—and the press continues to do this even in the face of violent attacks and threats. We have these rights—for now. To keep them, we must exercise them, reminding ourselves and our government that our silence is not an option. 

This sign was a reminder to the marchers.

The march ended in College Green Park.

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Your experiences, favorite chants and signs, and other comments are welcome below.

My Virginia Woolf Pilgrimage

 

Last fall, Marilyn brought me a gift, a tall candle of the "Secular Saint Virginia, Patron Saint of Lighthouses, Thursday Evenings, and a Room of One's Own." I laughed out loud when I first saw it and especially when I read the words on the glass. Still, as the new year began and I created a kind of altar to inspire my creative work, I placed the candle in the center, and I light it first each time.

As the candle says, her Saint's Day is today, January 25, Virginia Woolf's birthday.

Back in 2009, I spent the spring semester in England, in Canterbury, Kent. I loved living in a city about which Woolf wrote in a letter, "There's no lovelier place in the world than Canterbury." It seemed just right that it was in that medieval city, in the window of the Chaucer Bookshop, that I found a complete set of Woolf's letters published by the Hogarth Press.

I am in awe of Woolf's writing, laugh out loud at some of her letters, and love to get lost in the long sentences of Mrs. Dalloway.

During that semester in Canterbury, I went on what I called a Virginia Woolf Pilgrimage, visiting as many sites related to her as I could. Because I didn't want to drive on the "wrong side" of the road, I got to the more remote sites by buying gas and lunch for a local friend who liked opportunities to take road trips in her Italian Fiat--but had no interest in Woolf and was merely amused by my infatuation.

Today, on Virginia Woolf's 136th birthday, I'm sharing with you some photos from my pilgrimage. Come along with me to the streets where Woolf lived.

The house where Virginia Stephen was born, 22 Hyde Park Gate, London.

The front door at 22 Hyde Park Gate.

Three of the blue historical markers seen around London mark this house. 

Woolf's father and sister were also significant presences.

A view of the street where Woolf spent her early years.

Across the street from the Stephens' home is the house where Winston Churchill lived and died.

I was on a field trip at the British Museum with my students when our tour guides discovered I love Woolf. They offered to take me to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, where the Stephens moved from Hyde Park Gate. We walked over quickly as it got dark, and went into an art school that was now occupying the space. 

Though I was looking out the window a century after Woolf did, I still thrilled at the thought that I was seeing a view she might have, too.

Two of Vanessa Bell's paintings hung in what appeared to be a conference room.  The guides suggested mimicking the action in the paintings, and the two of them posed with the first painting. 

I am seated here while one of the guides stands next to me.

In the village of Rodmell, in Sussex.

Woolf's desk in her writing lodge.

At Monk's House with my Hogarth Press copy of Mrs. Dalloway purchased there.

The grounds of Monk's House.

Vita Sackville West's home, Sissinghurst, which Virginia Woolf visited. 

The original Hogarth Press, now at Sissinghurst.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf signed the guest book at Sissinghurst in September 1932.