Friday, May 02, 2003

Bursting into Bloom

I recently took my class of congenial first-year college writing students to collaborate with the kindergartners at Notre Dame’s Early Childhood Development center, in order to have big and little students talk with one another about writing – how we do it, and why we do it at all. My college students are on the cusp of finishing independent research projects, and they are flushed with triumph, both surprised and impressed by their own smart sentences marching across page after page. After nine months of quiet struggle and growth, they are truly born every May – bursting into bloom as adult thinkers, real players in the world of ideas.

My students felt the headiness of all this as we walked over to the kindergarten, all of us thrilled to play hooky from our syllabus on the first sleeveless day of spring. And what a spring! This year, every kind of flower is piling up on one another in a cheerful frenzy of fragrant blooms. The forsythia and magnolias are still frilled with duck yellow and pinky white, even though the tulips have splashed out. The daffodils are hanging on, though they usually crumple to faded tissue before the grape hyacinths pop up their bobbling periwinkle heads. Waves and waves of color upon perfumey color – the peachy flowering quince spraying into lilacs that are foaming up next to the flowering crab apples, while purply clusters of redbuds still stretch sunward on inky branches. Is spring always this ecstatic? Do we always say, as we’ve been saying this year, “Can you believe how beautiful it is? After that long, terrible winter – isn’t it miraculous?” Like the rhythm of the school year – all those dark months under icy blankets of worry and work – the whole world is bursting into bloom.

The kindergartners, like my college students, are also on the cusp of big things. They are just completing a semester-long study of the “neighborhood of Notre Dame,” in which they have been interviewing experts at the Golden Dome, the Basilica, and in the offices, dorms, and dining halls. They’ve been making sketches, squinting over blueprints, sounding out words, and writing about it all, their foreheads swelling with the effort of budding literacy.

When we arrived in the kindergarten room, the big and little students swapped writing tips ("Write about something interesting – like tarantulas or transportation."). The kindergartners were bursting with questions: “How many minutes does it take you guys to write a word?” The college students struggled to respond gracefully: “Oh, we can write many, many words in one minute.” The kindergartners take it completely straight, brows furrowed as they digest this news: “Right, then – this gets easier. Good to hear.” The kindergartners want to know if my students use their “inventive” spelling, or if they already know the “standard” ways to spell all those words. There’s an explosion of laughter as eyes swivel toward me, and I tattle that these grown up students often use inventive spelling – some real humdingers! And I confess that I use it myself sometimes, even after all these years of reading and writing. I’m still growing.

The students – big and little – then paired up eagerly to write sentences together, their foreheads nearly touching over fat red pencils and wide-ruled paper, ideas sparking between them. Behind them, sunny windows opened out onto those tumbling, hectic spring colors and I found it hard to breathe for a moment – inside and out, everything was so thrummingly, thrillingly alive. I think of Dylan Thomas’s line: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” That’s what we felt. Another poetic line about spring’s ecstasy comes to mind, by James Wright: “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom.” Yes, that’s it, too.

At bedtime these days, I’ve been rereading with my kindergarten daughter a favorite book from my childhood – the 1946 Newberry Award-winner, Miss Hickory. It’s about a twig doll with a hickory nut for a head who must survive her first winter outdoors after the child who made her abandons her. Miss Hickory is a definite type-A, bossing around forest animals and missing life’s effusive messiness and miracles. She only overcomes her hard-headed rigidity in the spring, when a greedy squirrel cracks open and eats her hickory-nut head. In one of those classically surreal moments of children’s fiction, Miss Hickory discovers that now that she’s lost her head she can feel and think freely. The twig doll staggers, “headless, heedless, [and] happy,” into a wise old apple tree, where, with her sap now running, she becomes a graft that invigorates the tree. In the final illustration, we can see that her once-dry twig body has burst into bloom.

I know her story is a metaphor, but this miraculous spring, for these students and for me, with fresh knowledge as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” it sure feels real.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on May 02, 2003
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