Tuesday, February 27, 2018

What We Get in Return

This morning my beloved husband came to breakfast with tears in his eyes. It's the night of the team banquet for the middle-school basketball team he's coached for three years, and he had printed off something he wanted to read to them, and was stuffing it into his gym bag. I teased him that if he couldn't get through breakfast without tears he would never, ever get through his speech without tears, but yeah, he's not even gonna try. The man wears his beautiful heart on his sleeve.

Then I went into my office and saw that he'd called up, on my computer, a blog post I wrote three years ago about his basketball team. I suspect he'll be reading some of that. And then I fell down a rabbit hole of my own creation, reading a bunch of old blog posts. Some were about my Egypt book, which I feel like I've still barely begun (despite finishing and discarding an entire first draft). What can I say? I've written books quickly and written them slowly, and the slow ones have always been better.

Meanwhile some teachers have been sharing their students' work with me online. One teacher posted a whole series of poems written in response to The War That Saved My Life. They were lovely. One said, "She has a pony. Butter. Like what she put on my bread." Now, of course I knew the pony was named Butter--I named him, after a horse poem I read years ago that contained the line, "his mane smells like butter in the sun"--and I also remember writing, "all she had, she said, but there was butter on the bread and sugar in the tea," the first meal my Ada eats in Miss Smith's house, when she's startled by the comparative luxury--but I swear I had never connected those two pieces, until this student did. The pony is a piece of softness, like the butter on the bread. That's really good.

In the same vein, only not really, a set of valentines made by another class. The ones the teacher shared made me laugh until I cackled. I really, really want to print them off and make them into t-shirts that I can wear when I'm feeling cranky. One says, "Ada, I've got a crutch on you." That's bad, and hilarious, but the absolute best, honestly, was a very fierce drawing of Mam--all big shoulders and scowls--and the caption, "For Valentine's Day, I'll let you out of the cabinet."

I'm dying. I can't even type that without laughing out loud. It's so perfectly perverse.

I love writing for kids.

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