All Good Things

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

This spring has been a bittersweet time for me. Some things are changing in my life; most are for the better, but they are still changing, and what’s so great about change? My grandkids seem to be doing strange and foreign things lately; things like graduating from high school and even college, way too soon. In fact, I just watched our granddaughter Sofi get her diploma from her school in Florida only a few minutes ago.  She was a baby only days ago, it seems. Talk about bittersweet.

One of our grandkids got married last year, another will in just a few weeks from now. Those things are all great blessings to our family, I know. Kids do grow up, and doing so successfully is a wonderful thing. Still, most of the grandkids don’t come to Grampy and Grammy’s for holidays anymore. Feeling sorry for me yet?

My career is about over too. In June I will retire, for the second time, from teaching high school English at Websterville Christian Academy; (a school I personally recommend highly). Every teacher everywhere must admit to looking forward to summer as much as the students do. Still, when it is your last year to do so, well, there’s that old bittersweet again.

Last week I gave my students one of their final English assignments for the year. Monday was an especially gorgeous day, so we went outside with notebooks and pens. I told them to separate, to go someplace alone to think, and to write. The assignment was to author a five-stanza poem about some aspects of the natural beauty around them. Easy, right? This is Vermont in springtime, after all. They were instructed to not just ‘be’ outside, but to observe at first the macro world. They could write about anything in that part of 0*creation, the blue sky, the green trees, images in the fluffy white clouds. But I also asked them to look down, to see the micro world, to observe the blades of grass at their feet as the mighty sequoias that they are to the tiny creatures that make their homes in the little shards of shade they provide.

I asked these teenagers, whose generation is widely thought of as an uncaring, media-obsessed, self-centered lot, to give me their written thoughts about all this. What I later received was a stack of well-written, thoughtful, and observant poetry that showed true appreciation of the immense complexities and beauty of the world we live in. I believe that this exercise was good for them; I know it was good for my faith in them.

So, all good things… the saying goes, ‘must come to an end.’ There’s that bittersweet feeling again.  I believe now more than ever that all truly good things are right here before us, if we just take the time to see them. It’s something I learned recently, from a bunch of teenagers.