My Three (Disheveled) Homes

Home.

Teachers have two homes: the classroom, and the place we live. Often – especially for us English teachers – the two spaces converge. Student essay piles swarm the living room table; the grocery list post-it flaps on my work desk like an eager dog’s ear. I enter grades from my kitchen table; I call my daughter’s dentist during my prep. I grab time in fistfuls, always alert for the next interruption. No task is inviolate. Fragmentation marks much of the day.

I wonder, then, if this is why the gleeful precipice from full-on teaching down to summer vacation carries some angst. I sit here on my first day of official vacation and I’m wandering the house like some directionless pinball, halfway wiping the table, picking up a book and reading a page, sitting on the stairs with my daughter, who I then follow upstairs so we can dance in front of the mirror awhile, back downstairs to fix a partial lunch, which is then interrupted by the washer buzzer telling me the load is done. And yet nothing has been done. No dishes, no vacuuming, no file drawer updated. It’s all been so – breezy. Flitting about little bird, I am. Looking in the mirror again, I adjust my hair and check my neck. I put a toothbrush back in a cup.

There are teachers who make summer reading lists and organize their days into neat plots. I imagine they are time-farmers, cultivating fertile rows with their hidden rewards. I envy them. I think of them and feel immediately inadequate.

 I will read some books this summer, but I do not rely on lists. One of my chief summer joys is Library Serendipity, or Hey, That Book Looks Good. The book I’m currently reading, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom (by Qanta Ahmed) was just such a prize. I can’t put this one down. I saw it on a shelf and was immediately drawn to it. I don’t know why. And I love this. I love, after spending my whole year devoted to the reading and writing lives of others, strolling through the dusty shelves for me. Call me selfish. But oh, the wanderlust I feel in the quiet rows of those written lives.  It is how I discovered that Paul Cezanne would stand with an empty canvas on a gravel road for days, and paint nothing. It is how my daughter and I “discovered” Bad Kitty, and why, in my 20s, I wrote down the (still-cherished) words of Marcus Aurelius.

The library becomes a kind of third home, a secular retreat, a touchstone. Unlike my classroom, I do not systematize my life there. There are things I look for, of course, and there is work to be done, but I need my time to unravel and to allow simple impulse – or dare I say it – whim­- to resurface. It is a small voice. I want to hear it.