These pictures were taken this weekend at a retreat on Mountain Hood (this is the way an old student of mine used to persistently call it, defying gentle correction).
It is the end of the year and I cannot form a reasonable sentence in English anymore. It is a peril of teaching ESL and listening to it all the time, it takes an actual effort to keep the funk out of my English.
You know I started this blog because I was so excited that my guest speaker said he thought I looked 21 when guessing my age. But then as I started to write, I felt so stupid because I realized he was just being a good man, a good politically astute man.
I guess standing in the shadow of 40 I am starting to test the water in the pool to see how it feels on my toe, to know that I am so close. Sometimes I feel like it is 2 steps forward and one step back, as Lenin used to say (are you there Jane? Have you seen this quote 343,004 times like I have?). Sometimes I still act like an 19 year old, not in a good way.
Here are my best new pictures. I am noticing that I am more interested in closeups rather than sweeping landscapes...
4 comments:
So beautiful! I was suddenly transported (tooken?) back the year I lived and went to school in northern Idaho. My boyfriend was a major hippie and we spent our weekends wandering around in the woods--and in the spring that meant "going mushrooming"! Everything was so fresh, clean, and bright! Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
I speak ESL as well. When I worked with the "fresh off the boat" group of Vietnamese students, my syntax was really off kilter. I found that their ESL speak was rather endearing and I almost missed it when they learned to say things correctly. Kind of like my own children learning to speak- their emergent speech is always going to have a soft spot in my heart and we keep it alive by saying things like "Scoo mese!" instead of "excuse me".
I'll be 42 this year in September....I whined quite a bit when I turned 40, but honestly, my 40's have been pretty great so far. And you really do start to develop more of an "what other people think doesn't define me" attitude and a certain directness, even though it seems cliched.(Oh, and Himself is 35. Maybe that's one way I've assured that I'll stay as immature as I've always been.)
My 30's were pretty great too (especially the late 30's), but I wouldn't go back to my 20's if you paid me. Blech.
Thanks for the encouragement Nic. I always felt that being 36 would be a magical number. Hmm. I honestly thought "when I am 36, I won't make the dumb mistakes I made even when I was 31". Well. It's like a spiral, or perhaps a tide rising. At the low points I am still regretting my own words/actions. At the high point I feel closer to being the adult I always knew I was somewhere. I am glad when people tell me that 40s is good. And 20s, geez, it could be true that youth is wasted on the young. They were better than the teens, but anything had to be better than that.
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