Back to School

It is the time for going back to school, and everywhere are scared and hopeful young faces, new satchels full of pencils and notebooks [that surely dates me!], and anxious parents hovering, encouraging, ready to say goodbye.

I feel as if I, too, am going back to school.  Ready to learn new things, this new phase of my life.  Laid off.  Retired.  Words to add to my vocabulary, sounding the syllables, testing the meaning, feeling the weight.

I, too, have my arms full of books.  I've bought new colored pens for drawing.  Emerald green.  Peacock blue.  Santa Fe turquoise.  Green Gulch pine.  I've pulled out my lovely Nuremberg diptych, with its wind rose and sundial, telling both Italian and Babylonian hours.  (I like to think that I am entering that time, the time of Italian and Babylonian hours, instead of the usual 8 to 5.)

I am scared as I begin this journey, but excited too—full of the love of learning that has drawn me ever since I was one of those young children dropped off in my first classroom with hinged wooden desks.  And now my classroom is the world, my heart, a clean slate of blackboard I must write my future on.

What will I learn?  Will my teachers be kind, and wise, and patient as I stumble over everything that's unfamiliar, hard to grasp, impossible to understand?

I wonder.  I am full of wonder.  As my friends' card said of me, quoting Henry James, "She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering."  Something happily to be going on with.

image:  Lili Butler reading at the Butler house, Giverny, 1908.

Theodore Earl Butler, (1861–1936) -American Impressionist.  Seven Arts Friends