After rain after many days without rain

Today I spent the day reading.  It was a perfect day.  I read on my balcony for a while, and then I walked to town under canopies of foliage, past wild daisies and blackberries, and through the field of butterflies, the river always lapping at my right.  I stopped at the Daily Grind for an iced Americano and took it to the shade of a big tree in Lowell Park with a trunk perfectly suited for my back. 

This day is in stark contrast to many of the days I’ve had as a first-year teacher.  In this last year it seems like I’ve experienced more failure than ever.  It seems like every slight misstep was observed and noted by students, families, colleagues, and leaders.  It has been comprehensively exhausting.  But, (and in French you can start a sentence with the word “but”) there were also many sweet moments when I was sitting in the middle of my room surrounded by working children with a line of kids demanding my attention, when I was filled with content and thinking, wow, this job and me, we are perfectly suited to each other.  More than a job, these kids are mine and I am theirs.

I remember on one of those first days when the sun turned from harsh winter light to sweet spring embrace and one of my students shouted from the summit of his swing, "Mademoiselle Defiel! Life is goooooooood!"  Yes, life in third grade is most certainly good. 

I don’t know if the contract for next year I was promised will survive the many end of year failures.  What I know is that I have a beautiful home, a loving family, books to read, and an always present, if sometimes tenuous, faith.  Grace like rain washes over me.  Grace will fall branch to branch, leaf to leaf, to the small stones buried in my soul for a thousand years.  Grace like rain will reform the footprints of missteps into the earth and where there were once blemishes nothing but God's beauty will exist.

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear--but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

-Mary Oliver