213 days have made their appearance on the calendar for 2017. Seems like a lot of them and you would think it would have taken more time to go through them all, but it has not. January 1st seems like it happened last month.
April 5th?
Well that was last week.
When I was younger I never thought about how fast time flew. Really. I never did. Time drug along. It seemed like I would never get to to kindergarten like all of my older brothers and sisters did. My October birthday arrived on the "slower than molasses" train each year when I was a kid. Santa? Well sometimes I was sure that he wouldn't arrive much faster than my birthday did. I waited forever to become a teenager and then even longer to go to college.
It was when I became a mother to 3 little babies that I began to realize how fast time was going. Likewise, by the time I had 10 years of teaching under my belt, I sensed as well just how quickly my career in education would go. The brevity of this thing called life is pretty sobering and for all those moments that I wished time would go by quicker, I now beg for it to slow down a bit.
It goes as it goes.
Time has a mind and a will of its own.
2017 has thus far been an eventful year. When it began on January 1st, I was a teacher at a great school just up the road aways in Randlett, Oklahoma. The 3rd graders in my class were getting ready for one giant push to do what was needed to excel in their state assessments that would be coming up in late March. We would end up putting in extra time out of our school day in order to have some extra practice. For 10 weeks, the kids and I stayed after school each day except Friday and worked for an extra hour on different concepts we had some struggles with.
It paid off.
I'm so proud of them.
On January 1st, my sister Sherry was alive and still going as strong as she could. I remember talking to her that New Year's Day and we both recalled when we were much younger that neither of us ever expected to live until that time in the future that they were calling the year "2000". It seemed so strange and foreign to think of it back in the '60s and '70s.
Yet we did.
There are now, including this day, 153 days left in this fine year. Trust me when I say they probably will go by just as quickly. What shall I do with them? Will I spend them wisely? Will I wish some of them away?
In about two weeks, I'll begin a new school year in a brand new grade in a different school in Oklahoma. I am looking forward to beginning it as if it were the first year I ever was a teacher. I'm excited for the possibility of a new challenge and plan to learn even more about what it takes to be a great educator. My sidekick, my mentor and older sister, won't be physically here with me any longer. No more phone calls along the way home to talk about the school day. Gone are the visits with her in person to look over students' work, to grade papers together, or just to sit and laugh about life. I'm going to have to do something that I have never done before in 4 decades of being a teacher.
I am going to have to make it on my own.
My hope is to end this year of 2017 on a great note. I want to look back on New Year's Eve night and know that I did my best to accomplish all that I could. And hey, you know what?
That's all we can be expected to do in the first place.
Our best.
This was the view looking up one day while we were sitting underneath the old Cottonwood trees in our front yard in the mountains of Colorado. (summer of 2014)
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