My Grandmother's House pt I

Imagine this: a 1920's Texas wood bungalow style house. Set up 4 feet off the ground on red brick pillars, with high ceilings to catch the breezes. (Day lilies and other flowers camouflaged the storage area between the floor and the ground.) Steep pitched slate roof. Mahogany wood floors throughout. Ceiling fans in every room. Wrap around deep porches on all sides to shade it. (Service porch on the back, with a drain hole where the ice box used to stand, and an outdoor toilet closet for "the help".) Bedrooms and the breakfast room were in that bump out style, with tall mullioned windows on three sides to create air flow. Art deco touches throughout- a wall niche in the hallway where the phone was plugged in, stained glass windows in the living room. Outdoors, hundred year old pecan and oak trees shaded it. Indoors, elaborate tile work in the enormous kitchen (maroon and soft butter yellow) and bathroom (light blue and sea green).

I remember taking cool tub baths in that bathroom as a child. Laying back in the tub, looking at the 12 foot high ceilings, surrounded by beautiful light blue bathroom fixtures, tile work, and a lush floral wallpaper ordered from France. It was a room of daydreams, an oasis in a hot Texas summer before air-conditioning.

My grandfather, a furniture maker, built that house for my grandmother when they got married. He hand selected every board in it to make sure there wasn't a knot or flaw in any of them. Made himself, in his furniture factory, the moldings, the balusters, cabinets, doors, mullions, and other stuff I don't know the names of. People often commented on what a lovely house it was.

Over time, modernization and a need for repairs changed the house. When the slate tile roof (originally blue-ish in color, with rounded slates) became leaky, brown square composition asphalt shingles replaced it. The house had always had electricity, with visible wires snaking down walls to giant switches that let out an audible "click" as you turned the lights on or off. Granny never felt the need to update the wiring, or add air conditioning, or change any of the fixtures or appliances. Vintage art deco light fixtures, door knobs, latches. She had a Chambers gas stove that was huge, white porcelain with silver knobs. A washing machine that was a round tub on legs with a wringer arm on the top. No need for a dryer- clothesline did the work. We'd consider that "green" nowadays. Granny considered it frugal; she preferred the smell of fresh air dried laundry, anyways.

When granny got to the point that she could no longer take care of herself or her house, she moved into a nursing home and the house went for sale. As the years passed, our family continued to keep an eye on it, driving through granny's small east Texas town on the way to somewhere else. The house seemed to have had a series of  owners - Granny's once genteel neighborhood gradually became commercial, all the homes but hers were torn down and laundromats and car repair shops built on the lots - until eventually someone moved the house to another side of town and turned it into a law office. Then one day, as we drove by to check on it, the house was a charred ruin. Clearly the original electrical wiring had not been updated.

I wish we'd had the foresight, or the time and money, to pull out the light blue bathroom fixtures or some of the art deco lights, door knobs, hand carved moldings, the stain glass windows. Wish that time would stand still, and I could visit the house again, and my grandmother would be waiting for our car to pull up, with a Siamese cat in her arms, stroking its fur.

Stay Tuned...Up the Down Staircase

A teacher friend of mine, disgruntled over recent events in public education, was trolling the web looking for the anonymous blogs of our fellow down-trodden, always-on-the-edge-of-fomenting-rebellion educators. There were none. Where is the outrage, the civil disobedience? Where are those troubled thousands, teaching without raises, without textbooks or computers or lunch breaks or bathroom breaks, in over-crowded classrooms, berated by parents, administration, students and politicians alike- even as test scores continue to rise, where are they venting? Why aren't they venting? My friend was shocked not to find anything on the web at all, and we discussed this topic at length. The best answer we could come up with was that folks in education these days are keeping their heads down, their mouths shut, minding their own business and praying that the insanity all around them passes them over, much as the fog of death passed over the Hebrew homes in Egypt. Much as the non-Jewish denizens of central Europe did in 1935. You know how effective that was.

I, too, am victim to this situation. I need my job to pay my bills and put my kids through college. But when I retire......just wait. I do know where some of the bodies are buried. Stay tuned!

Something

Something in the way it smells,
Repels me like no other odor.
Something in the way it oo-oo-ooozes.
I don't want to clean it now,
 But I know I need to and how.

Da-da-DA-daa-daaaaaa

Somewhere in the dark it grows,
Making a stink like no other odor.
Something in the stickiness glow-ow-ows.
I don't want to clean it now,
But I know I need to and how.

Da-da-DA-daa-daaaaaa

You're asking me will this mess grow,
I don't know, I don't know.
Stick around, and it may slow
But I don't know, I don't know.

Something in the way it smells,
And all I have to do is open it.
Something in the back- it scares me.
I don't want to clean it now.
You know I believe and how.

Pinterest (and other worthless, fun, addictive, beautiful time-wasters)

A gf convinced me to join Pinterest awhile back, and I've got to confess that's where a lot of my time goes lately. That's why I'm not blogging! I'm not sure what the purpose of Pinterest is, or how to describe it to the uninitiated. It's a website where you create a page for yourself, and customize it like facebook, link to your friends, and then you look at stuff other folks post, and share and trade- pictures, mostly. It seems to be 95% pictures, and less than 5% comments or text about the pictures. It is soothing after a stressful day to look at beautiful things, and one can accumulate files, called boards, of stuff you like to look at. It's like an online scrapbook. Pinterest seems to have about 99% female users, and the pictures that people swap around are infrequently personal pix (family, vacations) and mostly just images of pretty things, exotic locales, artsy crafts, cute animals or babies, funny sassy sayings, home decor, clothes, fashion, gardens, flowers, art, shopping, etc.  Most of the pictures people swap are of the wish-fulfillment variety: dream houses, vacations, idealized babies, fashion. A little DIY, recipes, and crafts. Very little reality going on here. Just in case you are interested, I'm on there, as I am on facebook, under my maiden name. If you know it, you can link to me.Or look for "GirlFromTexas".

What Have I Been Doing Lately?

I know the blog has dried up like a creek in a ten year drought lately, but I am slowly starting to get my life back lately and now have some time to write. The past several years I 've been taking graduate classes in English, as an add-on to the master's I already have in education, so I could qualify to teach dual credit classes at the local high school where I teach. Dual credit classes are a new fangled initiative by the state ledge, where high school juniors and seniors who sign up for an AP class can also earn college credit for that same class (provided, of course, that the same material is taught as in the regular college course). The AP scores required by colleges and universities to earn any college credit have been going up, with fewer and fewer kids earning the requisite scores. (I could posit my theories as to why, but that's another posting....) Gone are the days when folk could go off to college as a second semester junior from all the AP credit previously earned. No one takes scores of 2 or 3 anymore, it's 4 or 5 only.

Think about it: if you are in high school and are taking AP Calculus or AP British Lit, and working at a college level anyway, why not earn college credit while you are doing it? The advantage to students (and parents) is numerous: these classes cost a fraction (about 10%) of what they cost if you are enrolled solely in college (it's an initiative sponsored and underwritten by the state, so costs are subsidized, and free to students who meet criteria of being first generation, on free and reduced lunch, low income, etc), the credits transfer freely (at least to in-state public colleges and universities), you are in a smaller section with a teacher you know who is in the business of helping students - as opposed to the near universal freshman college experience of sitting in a class of hundreds of students, often in a course taught by a grad student, and the instructor has office hours once a week - if you can get in- and expects you to already know how to write an essay and isn't about to re-teach the skill if you don't.

I'm just about to wind up my first year of teaching these courses, and have (so far) enjoyed the situation immensely. Good students, easy to work with, fun to teach. I get a second paycheck from the university that sponsors the classes (and I earn every penny of it, as I now have dual sets of bosses: double the pleasure, double the fun ! twice as many meetings, grades to turn in , paperwork to fill out, emails to answer, requirements of all sorts.) and I need, it, as I am putting two of my own through college at once. I'm hoping to ride this situation till I retire...and thus avoid much of the misery currently tormenting my teaching comrades (gigantic classes, no textbooks, more and more state mandated testing that takes up half the school year....but I digress. That's another topic altogether.)