Fog and Clarity

           On Monday morning, I woke to a “freezing fog”; that’s what the weather report on the radio called it.  It was a perfect description for the air that was suddenly visible and for the delicate ice crystals that had settled on every branch and twig, and even on the prairie grass around the lamppost in our front yard.  The cold I have had all week had just begun its stay in my body, and I felt a kinship to the haze outside: my mind felt foggy, and my insides were freezing. 

            The next morning, I was rereading Adrienne Rich’s poem “To the Days” (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2001/02/09), one of my favorite poems of all time.  I was preparing for my Women in Literature class that afternoon.  The first line of the second stanza, “Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity” is lovely, as is the image in the next, “coffee and bread with sour plum jam.”   I felt fortunate that this was my work, is my work, to help students appreciate and analyze such sensory, evocative language.  That morning, I was also grateful for my copious notes on the poem; my mind was still foggy, and the day ahead was going to be long and full.

            At one o’clock that afternoon, I met my students in our classroom, where the sun streams in from the south, a luxury on a campus where some classrooms have no windows at all, and those that do are not always a source of light.  We spent over an hour on that one poem, discussing each line and all it evoked.  As always, I gained new insights, too.  When the class ended, the last student to leave chatted with me as she packed up her books.  She had been telling her advisor about this class, she said, and her advisor had remarked, “But I thought you didn’t like poetry.”  “I didn’t,” she had replied, “but I understand it now, and I love it.” 

At the end of class the previous week, after we had discussed poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton, another student said to me, almost as an aside, “I didn’t like these poems before we discussed them.  I didn’t know what they were about.  Now I really like them.  I understand them.”  She had contributed to the discussion that day, and I hadn’t noticed that she was confused, so her comment came as a surprise to me.  A surprise and a gift. 

            This Tuesday morning, discussing the line about “Fog in the mornings,” the students talked about the weather the day before and all the metaphorical meanings of fog.  Apparently they felt a “hunger for clarity,” too, and it was satisfied.

Distributing Food on the Third Thursday

Note: I wrote this piece for the December 7, 2011, issue of The Uniter, the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign (http://uucuc.org/), which has begun a two-year Hunger Initiative.

On the third Thursday of every month, I look forward to spending the evening volunteering at the Wesley Evening Food Pantry.  I know that at the end of the evening, I will feel tired, I will feel grateful, and I will feel happy. 

I have been volunteering at the pantry since I went there on a service project with Parkland College's chapter of the American Association of Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC) in December of 2008.  Ever since then, as long as I am in town, I spend an hour or more at the pantry on the third Thursday.  And that is all it takes for me to leave smiling and to know I made a difference: an hour or two each month.  I go every month because I enjoy it so much; I do know that when I am unwell or swamped, there are other volunteers who keep the pantry going.  I feel no pressure to go, just a desire to be part of it. 

The Wesley Evening Food Pantry was created by Donna Camp five years ago because she saw a need for an evening pantry for those who work during the day.  It takes place on the third Thursday to help folks to make it to the end of the month.  You can find out a lot more about the pantry at http://wesleypantry.org/. 

What I want to tell you here is that volunteering at the pantry is one of the highlights of my month.  Whether I help clients to "shop"--the pantry is set up like a grocery store--or walk around cutting open boxes of food, or hand out numbers to those arriving for the evening, I feel useful.  I feel like I am doing something concrete to make life just a little bit easier for someone else.  I also feel grateful for the opportunity to be kind to others who are having a difficult month.  Problems in this world are enormous, and I sometimes feel helpless when I listen to the news.  At the pantry, the helplessness is replaced by a sense of purpose created by a very specific task, a task that has to be done so that our neighbors have food for the rest of the month. 

I say I leave the pantry smiling.  I leave also feeling humble.  I know how tiring it is to go to the store after a long day at work.  At the pantry, I meet folks who sometimes wait an hour or two for their number to be called so that they can get groceries, and then they might share a ride or take a bus home.  They might spend the entire evening just getting groceries.  They have to have much more stamina than I do. 

Finally, I leave my Thursday evening shift feeling grateful--for the people who created the pantry, for the opportunity to help, and for the meal awaiting me at home.  I am reminded to appreciate the ordinary. 

The Hunger Initiative is going to organize a group volunteering opportunity at the Wesley Evening Food Pantry  on January 19, 2012.  If you would like to join the group of volunteers, look in future Uniters for information about training before that evening.