My mother used to say that she named me Meniva for the wisdom that was in my eyes the day I was born, that even then I was older than time. And as my hair slowly grew in white, she knew she had chosen my name correctly. My mother was beautiful, raven haired with pale skin, an oddity considering she was a farmer's wife. When she wasn't sewing clothes to be sold in the city, she labored in the fields, milking the cows, feeding the chickens, yet never tanned. I inherited her skin, always pale. As pure as snow she said of my skin and hair, though I'd not seen snow then.

I'd only known my father to be a farmer, and that he was kind and thoughtful. He'd always had a healing touch with our farm animals, working miracles on our old and tired creatures. I worked alongside him, tilling the plots and caring for the animals. Sometimes we fished or pretended to sword fight with sticks. Much to my mother's dismay, I was a tomboy and took pleasure in romping through the woods, fighting imaginary monsters. Rarely did I wear the beautiful dresses my mother sewed for me, preferring to cut up and refit my father's leather britches and canvas shirts. They suited my play style and seemed more practical. I got into my share of scraps with the neighboring farm boys, but we were all friends. It was during one of our regular runs through the woods that I first discovered I was different. One of our happy band stumbled upon a snake. Startled, the snake lunged for his leg and sunk its venom in before slithering into underbrush. The boy fell to the ground, his calf already beginning to swell. He began to turn a sickly green. I quickly reached for the leg of his trousers, pulling it up over his knee. I held his ankle to steady his leg while I looked at the bite, fearing we would not get back in time for help. As my fear grew, a light began emanating from my hands. Strange and uncontrollable, I was as afraid of the light as I was of the poison killing the boy. Within an instant, the poison appeared to be gone. His color returned and he felt no pain. Although we never talked about it, I knew he regarded me with curiosity after that. But then, so did I.

So here I am... sitting and thinking about humanity. My beloved, and admittedly my not so beloved, 7th grade students are taking the CRCT. The school is quiet, quieter than I've heard it in this past year. Even after school, there is always the straggler, the one banging around his locker because he, lost in daydream, forgot some book and has a quiz tomorrow. The clock is ticking and I can actually hear it. How unusual. It is counting down my 26th day until the last day of school.

I've already told them I won't return next year. A part of me is sad, and that surprises me. I wasn't meant to teach 7th grade, and yet, some of them have endeared themselves to me. I say this with pride: they really do love me. I worry about who will teach them subordinate clauses and comma splices. I worry about the 8th grade teacher who is really a social studies teacher, but who was forced to teach language arts. She doesn't teach grammar or writing because as she admitted to me, she doesn't understand it. I've been helping her prepare to teach poetry in the afternoons when our children are released from testing, flow through the hallways like a surging, angry sea, and slide into the shores of our rooms, bubbling from sitting for too many hours taking a test. Who will teach them that poetry captures humanity, however ugly or beautiful? That the words we choose have meaning?

If you teach, these quotes will be particularly funny.

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year for the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners.....

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse, without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

I woke up feeling surly again this morning and decided to curb it with some poetry, specifically Mary Oliver. Oliver is the poet that inspired me to continue writing my own poetry and led me to getting my MFA in Creative Writing. She's written several books of poetry (American Primitive and House of Light being my favorites) and handbooks on writing poetry that are frequently used in MFA programs across the nation. American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize and that's only one of her many awards.

I fell in love with Oliver because in contemporary poetry she is what I consider a dying breed. She is a nature poet, a leftover of the Romantics who are sometimes scorned by more modern critics. But, her verse is fluid, her images crisp, and no one writes a sunrise better than Mary Oliver. So, when I decided to take a more professional route with writing, I thought there was no tradition better to follow than that of the great Romantics... and I had found my contemporary model. I would be a Nature poet with a capital "N." Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men...

The last couple of weeks have been busy, but I haven’t stopped reading, so as bookworms do, here’s another book perspective.

Anyone else ever wonder what it would be like to live as the opposite sex? I just finished the book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back by Norah Vincent. It’s an interesting book because she didn’t alter herself medically or permanently (at least physically) and she’s not a cross-dresser or transgendered. She was merely curious and wanted to explore the idea of gender… as a guy named Ned. I’m not sure I could pull off such a feat.

Did you know April is National Poetry Month? I would be remiss if I did not post at least one poem, nay two for you to read in celebration of all things literary (though poetry is by far my lifeblood). I'll ease you in with...

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

I have a fascination with tattoos, which reminds me…

The Flannery O’Connor conference was last week at the university. We saw a lot of the Flannery fanatics’ foot-traffic, as I work in the manuscripts and rare books department that is the Keeper (insert beam of blinding light) of her papers. Even though I pass the locked fire-proof safes that house the manuscripts and letters every day going to my office, even though I help the scholars who study this manuscript or that attempting to extrapolate some meaning no one else has ever found, I’ve grown to seldom think about her as unique or renowned or awe-inspiring, but rather as another collection in the many collections. Then, I stop and truly think about it.

Even if you don’t recognize her name, I bet you’ve read her. At least one of her stories is frequently anthologized and

I’ve been reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. About Bill, and I call him Bill because after reading several of his books I feel we’ve reached the familiarity that comes with sharing personal experiences that allows one to call an acquaintance by his first name, not that I’ve shared the experience of traveling around America, or Europe, or Africa either for that matter, but I might as well have been in the car with him in the books… anyway, he’s got an American slant for British wit and humor and an uncanny knack for calling it like he sees it. If you haven’t gotten to know him, go meet him over at www.billbrysonbooks.com. Many of his books are travelogues about his treks around America, England, Australia, etc.

I highly recommend two in particular, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America and I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away. Both are easy reads, humorous, and quite enjoyable. I particularly

Life as a bookworm isn’t nearly as carefree as most imagine. I mean, aside from perusing the pages of the latest arrivals, I spend an inordinate amount of time dodging the occasional misplaced foot or book shoved back on a shelf. It’s almost sad the irreverence with which many of the students treat these lovely volumes, but that’s another blog.

Speaking of blog, I’ve never had a blog, but libraries are roads on the information highway so I’m test driving a VW bug. So, let me tell you about this book I read last week…

It was called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. He’s the author of Remains of the Day, which was made into a movie a few years back. Anyway, it’s a strange little novel that took a few pages to get into, somewhere between literary fiction, science fiction, and political commentary. In typical Ishiguro style, the narrative follows an odd pacing structure and it took me several chapters before I could truly become married to the idea of finishing it. But boy, the finale was worth the wait. I won’t give away the plot here in case anyone else decides to pick it up, but here's a summary...