Rain. Gloom. Chill. The only good thing about this weather is that it holds spring in place. Sometimes in Boston we have a stretch of such warm weather in April that everything enthusiastically opens up, and then wham! it drops below freezing and everything turns brown and drops off. Things are ALMOST blooming on the big terrace outside our apartment. And looking carefully to see what survived our hard winter and what didn’t, I found a strange sac attached to a stem of the perhaps-dead lavender. A tube, brownish, papery, about an inch across and an inch long. I consulted the expert, my 6-year-old granddaughter. A fly’s egg, she told me authoritatively. I’d hate to meet the fly. I have one more class at Smith, and I feel the way I used to toward the end of the school year in Chicago, growing up – eager beyond words. I went to a funky public school on Stony Island Avenue in Hyde Park, hard by the IC tracks. It was positioned just where the trolley cars had to make a turn to go under the viaduct. As the year drew to a close in June and the days got hotter, our teachers would have one of the big boys open all the windows with a long pole, and we could hear the screech of the trolley as it went by. Best was when one of them took the turn too hard and lost its connection to the wire overhead. The drama! We were allowed, sometimes, to go to the window and watch as the conductor got out and tried to reconnect his wand-like trolley pole to the wire. Often the passengers got out too, and made suggestions or tried to help. Sometimes a second car came along and had to wait, with that conductor getting out and offering advice. Anything, anything, to break the tedium of those long, sweltering last days before we were set free. Perhaps the chill here actually helps with these last days. Also helping was that I spent all last week – except for the day I drove to Northampton to teach – in a booth doing the audio version of the new book. I find it so interesting, the tightrope you walk between reading and acting when you’re taping a book. I’ve only done three – the others were read by pros – but I’m addicted. And hoarse.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 13:30:16 +0000
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