The persistence of yellow5/10/2023 Maybe I was subconsciously using perennials that return each year as some obvious metaphor for persistence as they peered at me from their childhood homes in California, Texas, South Carolina, and Maine.Purchased this on behalf of my sister. During my closing online class, I showed the students a vase of flowers, which my daughter and I had arranged on the wrought-iron table on my deck. The land here in the mountains was - and is now - sacred ground, occupied first by the Cherokee, as evidenced by the archeological sites on campus.Īt the end of the semester, I snipped an iris at its base, the luminous purple petals reminding me of our history as resilient people in diverse places. With my daughter’s supervision, I was careful to only take a few, but I always felt guilty, like I should apologize to the landscaping supervisor or maybe even the president of the college who lived down the street. When my daughter and I biked to pick flowers every few weeks, I carried a fabric bag that wouldn’t crush the tender buds. The job provided both a refuge and an intersection with their studies - weeding a flower bed on their knees and talking to peers about relationships, professors, their courses, the world. The beauties that grace my house-the few blooms in four vases-gave students a true hands-on education. Some alums who once worked on landscaping crew have pursued jobs such as an arborist, landscape architect, or even flower farmer. Our students had planted these floral masterpieces since this school is a work college, one of nine in the country, where undergraduates log ten to twenty hours on campus on crews that include forestry, instructional technology, library, garden, and even blacksmithing. Essential staff in facilities, the farm, and garden drove their trucks or golf carts past the blooms, and the landscaping supervisors did their best to maintain the land without their crew of student workers. She meant the students dispersed across the country, with only a handful who stayed and picked up to-go meals from the cafeteria. “But it’s such a shame there’s no one here to see it.” When our students first left campus, I jogged through the trails with the education professor as the azaleas were bright in bloom. The stems reminded me I could do hard things, even when life was turned upside down for my children and my students. I placed the daffodils in a textured pottery vase made by a friend who once grew all her food in her front yard on campus. At the time, the bright yellow flowers in my kitchen reminded me of children’s raincoats ready for adventure. We’d picked a handful of daffodils at the beginning of the pandemic, when my stomach churned before each online class, as I tried to teach place-based environmental education lessons on a screen. To find some grounding amidst the emotions in our home, I sometimes stepped into the tiny room to stare at that one flower. Next to the shower, there was barely room for two people to stand, but the graceful flower made the space feel sacred to me. Since the students left, I’d measured the weeks of online teaching - and the pandemic - by the flowers I’d selectively taken to fill four small vases in my 900-square-foot rental duplex.Ī pink and white rhododendron rested in a squat glass vase in the bathroom now shared with my ninth grader and my 21-year-old daughter, reluctantly home from her own school. This land and its trails once open to the public were closed to everyone except employees like me who lived on campus. Since the onset of the coronavirus, this campus in full-blown spring was deserted, like a movie set where the actors had gone on strike. Their blooms were beginning to fade, the petals wrinkling. She was right, of course, so I backed away, leaving the red tulip among its yellow neighbors.
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