*This post was written a few weeks ago but life got in the way of posting it.
Today the kitchen needed to be cleaned, and I was procrastinating. Old friends posting on social media about their kids returning to class turned my thoughts to my time in elementary school and my fourth grade teacher. She was one of the best.
I wondered what I might say to her, how I might express my gratitude for her encouragement and praise, and what we might talk about if we had the chance. I imagined her as interested and supportive as she was to the little me, and as I finished up the last of the dirty dishes I realized I had just briefly reviewed my whole life from fourth grade to today. Not all time travelers use machines.
There were many memories of things I was once deeply interested in but have left behind. In the moment of dismissal, we often think of letting go of things we like and are good at as sad or even tragic. This might be a mistake — context matters. I’m often drawn towards seeing what is around the next bend or over the next hill. You have to get off the hill you’re on in order to summit the next one. Not all hills are obstacles, but sometimes, the one you’re on might be.
There were two important components that went into making the fourth grade a great year. The first was that my teacher saw potential in me and encouraged me to explore my capacity to do well. The second was that I put in the effort. The more effort I made, the better I did. The better I did, the more she encouraged me. Not all spirals are downward.
But I haven’t always had a great fourth grade teacher at my side every step of the way. I’ve often gone on to the next hill without considering the cost or worth of it, and now find myself on many hills at once, having not done some things necessary to keep myself fit for my ambitions in the process. 87 chickens. 65 quail. 12 geese (geese count as 4 chickens each!) Bird math: it can get anyone. And now there’s also tree math, harvest math, laundry math, global warming math (we’re seriously melting this week) and to top it all off: pill math! That’s right, my own body has become a quite the hill lately, and I got pills y’all. Not all math is algebra, but all of my school teachers were right: this life takes math.
So the next time you’re buying some tasty goodness from a farmer, throw them some extra math with a president’s face on it, especially if their farmer’s markets were closed recently due to the heat wave. They might not all have had great fourth grade teachers and most of them are probably struggling with the math right now.
As for me, I’ve put off the To Do list long enough with this post and need to go do some laundry math. Let’s see — manure pants times the sweaty shirts, divided by all the mis-matched socks…
On second thought, maybe I’ll just go back to the internet and daydream about class B camper vans. It counts as math if I’m eating pi at the same time, right?