Wheatzie

My junior high schoolers performed a beautiful Christmas concert last Friday.  Yesterday, as I was at the front of the classroom teaching my “5-Paragraph Essay in 15 Minutes” lesson to the 7 th graders, one of them raised her hand. “Mrs. L…were you crying last week during our Christmas concert?” I wanted to say something like, Yeah , you guys were so bad it brought tears to my eyes because that’s the type of relationship we have. Instead I said, “I was.   I guess you could tell?” “ A little bit ,” she replied, smiling and holding her forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart. “A little bit” is putting it mildly. I’d been bawling all over myself.  My husband had been teasing me about it and had asked if I wanted a tissue, but he’d never brought me one—probably because he would have had to do that crouch-walk all the way across the gym as he attempted to snake his way to the bathroom around 300 parents catching video of their children.  You kno...

One Thanksgiving about 20 years ago, I made brownies. “They taste like….” my younger brother said, chewing around a piece carefully as he furrowed his brow in concentration, hoping to find just the right word, “…they taste like paint .” I snapped my fingers and nodded because he’d done it.   He’d found the right word.   Even though I had never actually tasted paint, not even one tiny lick of the wall when I was a little girl, they did.   Those brownies tasted like paint. There were a lot of excuses made for me that day from well-meaning members of my extended family:   the oil was probably bad; the butter might’ve been salted; maybe the chicken that had laid the particular egg that I’d used in the recipe had been feeling a little “off” that day… “Or maybe she just sucks at baking,” my older sister suggested as she floated through the kitchen to refill people’s drinks. Well, of course she would say that.   She was the one hosting Thanksgiving that year...