On Love and Death and Photographs

Nov 12 Share a photo - or photos - of things / people you are grateful for.

I thought this would be a quick blog post...just find a few snaps to show some things I'm grateful for. Instead I opened a photo folder and found myself transported back to the spring my youngest sons, then sophomores in high school, and I visited Max, my oldest son who was teaching in the Marshall Islands at the time.

Maybe my mood is impacted by the email notice I got this morning telling me that I qualified for early retirement. (Me?! But I'm too young! You must be mistaken. You say I'm dead wood? You say our school would be better off if I slip off stage left and let an ingenue take my place?) Then, a well-intentioned question from a colleague this afternoon required me to put into words if/when I might stop teaching comp.

My mortality box is a tiny velvet, silk-lined box buried deep under my piles of LIVING. Every now and again I see it flash past, but I'm usually too busy to peek inside. Today it showed up twice. Once at the suggestion of retirement, and again when I had to think about the end of teaching a class I love. When I opened the Marshall Island pictures, I was transported to the other-worldliness of a trip that is now almost four years in my past. The pictures compounded my sense of life rushing past me. Clocks ticking.

One of my college professors told me that all poetry is about love and death, life's two ultimate questions. I can't look at pictures tonight without feeling both.

Son Max with his host brother Anthony. Because we visited at the end of Max's year on Wotje, he returned to the states with us. This was taken on his last night on the island. 

The amazing going-away celebration the community threw for Max 

Harrison, Max, and a dear boy whose name I have forgotten

A wall in Max's classroom

Brothers

Harrison and Stuart in God's water

Son Max Hoegh

Children of Wotje