Poem: "Yellow Bowl"

It's the last day of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day! This is the poem in my pocket today:

"Yellow Bowl"
~ Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.


I like the concrete imagery and the sense of light and color and peace.

Earth Day

Hostas on a rainy Saturday at the zoo

(Goodness, I don't remember making the card that large! Sorry.)

Speaking of the earth... I like trees. :) I have a lot of pots on my balcony, and anytime one of them is "invaded" by a volunteer tree seedling, I try to surrender the pot and let the tree grow. (Okay, not for sweetgums. But everything else.) I'm currently raising two willows, four longleaf pines, and two oak trees, and I've planted one young oak and gave another to Andy and Charlie to plant. I hope to plant a lot more! I've been thinking about it recently because of all the beautiful old trees Mena lost in the tornado. I spoke with a Forest Service worker last weekend, and after offering me 200 mulberry saplings on the spot (sadly, I couldn't take them) he told me they're making arrangements to get some trees over to Mena, either for this planting season (which ends in a week) or next year's. The Forest Service will give away trees by the hundreds, the problem is arranging the labor and space to put them in the ground. I could personally plant five or ten at a time, but not 200.

Tornado photos

Easter weekend (two days after the tornado) I went home to see my family and go to church, and after church Mama and I drove around. We kind of needed to see things for ourselves to really get a handle on it. In case any of my hometown buddies would like another view of things, I put some of my pictures in the album linked below. Note, these were taken after two and a half days of cleanup had already taken place, but it still looks pretty awful. The photos aren't great, as it was a rainy day and the car was moving a bit.

Mena Tornado April 2009

Short video of Layla describing the effects of the tornado. Sorry about the wobble at the very beginning here. Layla is leaning out of frame because she wants to see my face, not the camera, while she talks to me.



(And another short vid of her.) She has seen The Wizard of Oz at least a dozen times, probably, so I wondered if she associated Mena's tornado with what she saw in the movie, but I didn't think to ask her.

In my last post, I said I hoped the main structure of the Middle School would be fine, but now the report is it's been condemned. I'm surprised at how upset I was by that news. I think I assumed that building would be there forever, and having a landmark like that is comforting, especially when it's a place that holds so many of my personal memories of my formative adolescent years. (As well as a lot of other people's.) I loved the fact that it had an upstairs - no other school nor most other buildings in town do, I loved the bathrooms with the old tile and the stalls made of solid wood, I loved the full sized windows that you could actually see out of. It was a good old building.

And it's a loss to the community: the auditorium hosted not only Middle School assemblies but dance recitals, beauty pageants, high school plays and more. And then there's the cafeteria, site of generations of proms and band banquets. (I'm sure it says something about me that I'm way more nostalgic about those band banquets. Remember how Mr. Gray would dance with each of the senior girls? It was so sweet.)

Well, that's enough moping about a building. The students have been moved to a church and an empty school in the next little town to finish out the year, and people are continuing to clean up their homes and workplaces and figure out what to do. I'm curious about the libraries and I've even had some librarian friends asking about them, so if anybody knows how the books fared at the Middle School, Community College, and public library, I'd love to know.

To end on a lighter note, here's a picture of Allie and Layla from Easter Sunday.

Hometown tornado

Well, it's been 16 years since the last one, so I guess we were due for another tornado? This one was worse than anyone can remember. I've heard from my family and they're okay, houses intact, thank goodness, but a lot of people and property were not so fortunate. I wouldn't mind hearing from my other hometown buddies - y'all okay? Families safe, houses still there?

The Arkansas Times has a photo gallery of damage. You can see Main Street, the courthouse, the middle school, and on the second page of photos there are some especially impressive and awful-looking aerial shots of damaged areas - large trees laid flat like grass, foundations of houses swept clean. Basically, your classic "holy cow" tornado aftermath pictures. It's been strange going through them to see if I can identify any houses of people I know. It's not going to be the same around there for awhile.

While looking at the photos, I remembered a teacher telling me sometime during middle school that our building was one of the best places in the county to be during a tornado: the main part was built back in the 40s (if I recall the date) with steel reinforced concrete and just very solid. It looks like it sustained some significant damage, but indeed, the main structure held up very well.

April at the zoo

I have a membership to the zoo here, and it's been a great investment. The zoo is a safe, pleasant place I can go to get out of my apartment and be outside, and bonus, there are animals! There's even a large gazebo with free wifi, and I often go there to grade papers away from the distractions in my office or apartment. That's what I was doing on Saturday for about five hours, but I also managed to take a few pictures.

(Click on the thumbnails to see the photos better.)



One of the giraffes observing a human family | Grey crowned cranes in their new veldt habitat


Dogwoods at the zoo | Young hickory leaves and a pine near my apartment


Green grass and a strawberry blossom growing by the camel enclosure fence | Profusion of pink and white azaleas

Humor is the hardest thing to translate

I think this NPR bit was my favorite April Fool's news prank today. It's not only the subject ("cetaceaculture" - in the Midwest, no less), they do a great job of spoofing their listeners' letters and even their own on-air corrections.

"In achieving three-part harmony in whale song, I think we have tied nature's most wondrous sound to a great barbershop tradition."

I was cracking up in the car on the way home from work. Then their teaser was a report that some Kindle readers have been injured by faulty online popup books. Ha!

Did you also hear you can get squeezable bacon now? And Star Wars fans rejoice, because a tauntaun sleeping bag is available. It's brilliant if you're familiar with The Empire Strikes Back. It has an intestinal lining! Features:

* Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass
* Glowing Lightsaber zipper pull
* Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever

The Guardian is switching all its reports to Twitter format. ("JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?") Oh, and finally a tartan sheep!

When warning/explaining to my students about the traditions of April Fool's Day, I let them look at the Wikipedia homepage for awhile. It had an article on the "Museum of Bad Art (MOBA)" and news briefs about the Irish prime minister being spotted naked in downtown Dublin and NASA reporting falling diamonds. The students were complete blanks; I couldn't get a reaction out of them at all. It's really hard to tell what's going on with a class at 8 a.m.; are your teaching methods inadequate, is the cultural context not translating, or have the students' brains merely not woken up yet? Today, I'm going to say it was the latter, because from the second class, at 10 a.m., I got a much more lively reaction. It may have also helped that I showed them this video of the BBC's classic 1957 prank story on the Swiss spaghetti harvest.



It helped illustrate my point that a good spoof or prank uses specific details to establish plausibility. I have a powerpoint presentation on satire which I put together one semester after a student turned in an assignment using an article from The Onion as a source, but it only seems to work when I have French students in class. Bless the French, they do appreciate satire.