Hello All! I'm so happy to be hosting Poetry Friday.
I have spent the last few months preparing to move out of the building I have spent the last 29 years in on campus. It is my home away from home. There is much I will miss about it. The physical move of all our things occurred this week and still continues, as bookshelves are installed, and furniture moved in. I have been adrift for weeks, with no place to land, settling most days in the library before my classes meet in the late afternoon. We will be allowed to move in next week, and I can't wait.
In seeing my new office, I am saddened that I have lost so much space to store my books. Out of necessity, I will need to let some go. While I will be able to pass them on to new teachers just starting out, it will hurt to part with them.
Thinking of moving had me reading Ralph Fletcher as I packed up. In Moving Day, Ralph gives readers a series of free verse poems in which 12-year-old Fletch describes his family's move from Massachusetts to Ohio. Here's one of my favorites from this collection.
Defrosting the Freezer
One container of spaghetti sauce
Grandma made before she died.
Two pieces of old wedding cake
you couldn't pay me to eat.
Three snowballs from last winter
slightly deformed, no longer fluffy.
Four small flounder from the time
Grandpa took me deep-sea fishing.
Everything coated with a thick
white layer of sadness.
**********