School Is Out

by Donna Schoenkopf

School is out.

I am free.

I am one week into the summer.

I am back to being a retired school teacher, in her house, on her land, with her animals.

I know from my past life, that my current stresses and worries will peel back, lift off, like layers of an onion.

This is how it goes:

First week: Wow. I feel good. So relaxed.

Second week: I don’t have to get up. I can do anything I want. FREEEEEDOM!

Third week: My mind is unfolding. I think new thoughts.

Fourth week: I am beginning to dabble in things I’ve never done before.

Etc.

But this first week of freedom begins like all other weeks.

My cats wake me. They jump on my bed at six. I shush and shoo them, head still on pillow, eyes shut, but they want breakfast, please.

I open my eyes to a house with morning sunrise-tinged light that filters in through the trees and then through my sliding glass doors.

I get up, pee, go to my kitchen area with cats at my ankles, and give them their morning crunchy cat food.

After Che the Cat finishes his, he puts his paw gently on the top of Rosie the Cat’s head and keeps it there while she eats. This is his signal for her to move over. He’s done with his food and now will finish hers. She moves away and jumps up to her place behind the TV. She can barely squeeze in, but it’s safe from Che’s constant attentions to her girl parts. He still has the urge, even though he’s spayed.

What a guy.

Diego the Dog yawns from his bed on my couch. I pour out the old water from the animals’ water bowl and fill it with fresh, purified water. Diego disembarks from his bed, stretching like an old man. He ambles over to the kitchen area and eats his crunchy dog food that I’ve just put into his bowl, then eyes what’s left of the cats’ food.

I put on some filtered water to boil for my morning cuppa coffee, take my vitamins and single Singulaire pill to avert asthma. (How I HATE that pill and every time I take it I think that it has made me dependent on it. And every time I decide I’m not taking it any more I have the gaspies the next day ... so on it continues.)

I go back to my bedroom area, with the light slanting through the sliding glass doors, and turn on Morning Joe.

Up to this point, this has been my routine during the work week, but now, NOW!, it is different even though it begins the same.

I do not have school. Not for a whole summer.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE TEACHING. I am good at it. I love every minute of it. But, the “have to” part of it rankles. I have to get up at a certain time. I have to dress a certain way. I have to brush my teeth before 10 am. My hair has to be clean. I have to be at the school on time.

This puts a stress into me that is deep and painful.

But by the time I’m in my car and pointed toward school, I’m fine, stress gone, eager to get to class, and then I dance through the day till the final bell rings.

And when that bell rings, and I gather my things from the classroom, and check out at the office and head for my car, I find that I’m exhausted. Wrung out.

By the time I get home, I collapse. I lie on my bed and just vegetate. Television is good. Food is good.

I get fatter. And older. And more tired.

As I get sleepier during the evening, I begin to stress because tomorrow, again, I will have to get up, get dressed, brush my teeth, and get to work on time.

So I retired.

I retired because I was losing steam. I was not a spring chicken any longer. I wanted to go out on a high note, a grace note, a note of appreciation.

I did not want to be the crazy old lady teacher who was behind the times and half deaf and who had a funny smell and repeated herself too many times and whose class parents didn’t want their kids to be put in.

But that scenario does not play out now.

I do not have school. Not for a whole summer.

I’m in my new phase. I planned for it for three years. I saw it keenly in my mind. I thought and dreamed and designed and worked very, very hard and saved my tiny resources.

And I am here now. And it is exactly how I saw it. Even better. The full dimension of reality gives my life ... I don’t know. Gorgeousness.

I want to make art. And good food. And grow things. And look at things, long and deeply. I want to be as natural as possible. To feel the rhythms of my body. To listen to the ideas in my head. I am ready to, no ... MUST ... go on to the next stage of my life. I’m feeling it in my body and brain.

And now I have a summer free. (I still feel the stress of the next school year, three months off ... but will pull my consciousness off of the distant day, and live in the moment if I can.)

Let me take you with me in this gentle time. This is how yesterday began.

After some Morning Joe I decided to keep watching politics. I switched over to C-SPAN and listened to the poets on Book TV.  (One woman talked about her grandmother sending mashed potatoes through the mail.) After that I got on my computer, checked my e-mail, found how to concoct a natural bug repellent for my poor cottonwood sapling which has been ravaged by caterpillars (dish soap and water sprayed on the leaves), and then went outside to see what was shakin’.

Oh, it’s a beautiful world outside.

I do a walkabout.

I start by going out my back door, the one off my kitchen and office areas. Out the door is my deck. The first one Annie and I built. The one we had to dig through solid, rock hard clay so the deck wouldn’t be too high for the door jamb. Hours. In the blazing sun. Oooooooooo. 

I keep my Day-Glo green rubber clogs out there next to my shelving with plants and rocks on it. I bend over, look into them (there might be a brown recluse spider in there), pour out whatever water is in them and step off the deck.

I clog out to look at the fruit trees first. Damn. Some of their deep green leaves have turned yellow. They lack either nitrogen, potassium or calcium. I think. OR it could be the damn clay. It is so dense that it probably is smothering those poor little roots. I’ll be back, Fruit Trees, and bring you something good. Mulch, maybe. Or organic fertilizer. Or both.

Out to the fig tree. The one Helen gave me. The naked little stump I tossed on that hard-baked clay and started watering several months ago has sprouted up. Tall stalks of beautiful deep green fig leaves shoot straight up off that trunk. And I see nubs of leaves appearing all over the bark of the miracle wood. I remember how the deer had nipped off the first leaves and baby fruit the tree had produced last fall. HA! The deer didn’t kill it!!

I think of the Biblical fig trees, and how lovingly the writers of the Bible wrote about them. I think about the fig leaves that hid the privates of Adam and Eve. I think about how the fig tree has survived over the millennia. No wonder my fig tree is alive and thriving. Fig trees have a STRONG life force. And are very adaptable. They flourished for me in the cool, moist air of San Pedro, and now are conquering the hardscrabble dirt and heat and winter of Oklahoma.

Good, Fig Tree!

I walk over to the compost pile, which is a pile of composted manure Peewee surprised me with one day. He just drove up with a dump truck, backed up to a space next to the shed he built me, and tipped the bed, and out poured this fabulous compost.

He is going to heaven. If there IS a heaven.

Some of it I wheeled out to the front “yard” in hopes of prodding some life out of the dirt. But the rest has been the repository of my vegetable kitchen scraps and egg shells. I have a small shovel, a child’s really, that I dig a hasty hole with and bury the scraps in the side of the mound.

Sometimes stray onion skins blow in the wind. Escaped avocado rinds, with their little Dole decals, lie half buried. Apple cores and egg shells peek out from under the dirt.

But also, amazingly, green sprouts of melon, onion, sunflowers, tomatoes, and who knows what, have been pushing themselves out of the dirt in clusters of healthy new life.

I am going to have to look for new places to throw my scraps. The compost pile is sated.

My story is full. So next week, we’ll get past the back door on our walkabout.

I can’t wait for you to join me.

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