Swirls

I know it’s been a while since I wrote something substantive here, and hope I've been distracting you with pictures of puppies and children. This has been a writing week for me, a week of writing essays about teacher research at NZCER and working like mad to get the book proposal and sample chapters done on the leadership book. Keith and I are working to get the full proposal package to the man we hope will be our editor by the end of the week (I meet with him when I’m in the US in two weeks) and so we’re having to write and rewrite and edit and figure out what we’re going to say (not always in that order). So there’s been tons of writing for me, but you haven’t seen it.

So, quickly, a graceless update for those of you who are really curious. Walking down from school yesterday I felt a stab of longing for Oyster and for the teachers and families I loved there, especially those who were my students at GMU—C and E, most especially. And I wondered if they ever looked at the blog and what they’d make of it and whether they’d ever come to visit. And when I got home and logged on, there was a blog comment from the two of them which made me wonder about the way the universe works. If you’re still reading you two, yes, the kids have grown astonishingly big. They’re working on their Spanish each week with a lovely Mexican teacher who comes and sings songs and reads books with them. They are happy and growing and wonderful. And please please do come and visit us!

Today, Michael and I walked along the beach—as we always do in the morning—and the storm from last week still seems to be messing with what comes up on the beach. For a week the sea was so high that our morning walks had to be to Campbell park (which is no real hardship) to throw balls to Perry in the sunrise across the soccer fields. Now the beach has returned, and it’s changing more than usual. At first there was the ordinary post-storm assortment of sticks and shells and weird human detritus (a belt, a shoe, a cooler bag). Yesterday, it was scrubbed clean of everything and the wide beach was just dark grey sugar sand. This morning there are sticks again, little ones, and, at the foot of our street, dozens and dozens of magnificent little swirled shells in party colors. Some of them still had their occupants inside, soft and yet somehow irritable when we picked them up to turn them over. Those go back in the sea. But dozens of others were too beautiful to let the sea take back, so Michael and I ignored the beautiful light coming over the hills, ignored the glassy sea, and looked at our feet at the shells. I felt like Naomi in a candy store. I have been wanting a good shell day so that I could find shells to bring to the US when I’m there, to give a piece of New Zealand to the people I visit. And I found my dreams answered, washed up on the shore at the foot of our street.

Ok, back to book writing. I hope that spring is coming where you are. Here we’ve had a return to summer, although the change in clocks means that we don’t get our post-dinner sunset walk—the sun sets during dinner. Other than that one inconvenience, and the astonishingly busy April which is coming, life is a swirl of shells and sand.