As my sixty-third New Year's Eve has now come and gone, I still find myself reflecting on past years while wondering what the year 2013 will hold. At this age and still dealing with the unknowns of living with a type of bone cancer, I am thankful for each new day when my body is cooperative and my mind is still functioning.
Even after 40+ years of teaching English, I still look forward to another semester of introducing students to the literature of my Appalachian homeland as well as to the ins and outs of the English language in my Adv. Grammar class and the ups and downs of becoming a high school English teacher in my ELA Methods class. Each new semester brings new students into my life who will leave their imprints in my mind. Some will choose to learn while others will choose to criticize--that is just the life of a teacher.
When I began my career in 1971 as one of the few white teachers in a high school in Lowndes County, Mississippi, I could never have anticipated where the journey would take me. I just knew that I had loved learning about language and literature from the time I was a child in Pineville, WV. My first priced possession had been a small easel type of chalkboard that became the center image in a school for my dolls. Having received this gift from Santa in my preschool days, I suppose my only model for teaching had been in Sunday School and/ or Vacation Bible School at Cook Memorial Baptist.
My mother had been the teacher for 4 and 5 year-olds, the first teacher I remember. While life had never provided her with the opportunity to attend college and to have a career that she loved, she began the journey for me. We had few books in our home: a Bible, a Bible story book, and a book of fairy tales. We eventually received our neighbor's used newspapers. Mom taught me my alphabet, using the letters on the countless coal cars that passed on the tracks behind our home on the Guyandotte River and in the shadow of a large rock formation called Castle Rock.
When the train cars weren't passing, she used the letters in those few books and on that newspaper headline: Beckley Post-Herald. She taught me about nature as we wandered about in the woods, finding dewberries or blackberries, or gathering different types of leaves or picking wildflowers. In our small yard, we planted flowers, trees, and vegetables. watching how they grew from small seeds into full-grown plants. I learned from her that life changes as do the seasons. There are endings and beginnings, times for living and for dying and in that interval between, the importance of learning to cherish and / or endure the times when we rejoice and when we mourn. Both her mother, MaMa to me, and she were readers, learners, and storytellers. They taught me that life was really a series of blank pages just waiting to see what a person would write there. They taught me to write the story of my life and to fill it with loving and learning and living as a person of faith.
As I now look forward to another year of being Gramma to my young grandchildren, ages 4, 7, and 11, I hope that I am passing on this legacy to each of them. They have brought such joy into my life and allowed me to share my stories with them. Each time they come through my kitchen door with "We're here, Gramma, " or ask "Tell us another story, Gramma," or inquire, "What do you want to do?" they make my life meaningful and rich. While I am approaching the last chapters in the story of my life, they are just beginning. On each New Year's Day, I pray that they will find life to be full of simple gifts, a life filled with love and learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment