Is Ice Another Word For Snow?

It was another one of those lovely mornings graced by a slick layer of ice, school closings and delays, and having to hazard another vehicular ride down the hill, regardless. But I like the school in the morning when nobody is there. It's warm, it's quiet, and it's reminiscent of when I used to work nights. If teachers stayed on too late after the kids left, I would sometimes suggest to them that it was time they went home as well. I would point out to them that everything would still be there in the morning and they would want to be as fresh as possible for the returning tide of children. This often brought to their faces a look of dark and quiet fear; the realization perhaps of the fact that nothing they could do in that evening would prevent tomorrow morning from coming.

Except possibly a snow day. Or an ice day, which is the hallmark of this particular winter. We've had several. One morning when I came in, fully expecting that I would have the empty building to myself, there was already a teacher there. The auto-alert system had failed, and she had missed the follow-up call because she had needed to leave earlier than most since she lived so far away. She sat at her desk,  tears running down her face. She explained that she usually went running every morning, so she could face coming into school. She hadn't been able to run that morning because the road was too slippery.
   "Love your job?" I asked, none too kindly, I suppose.
   "I hate my job!" She said emphatically. "Day in and day out, trying to teach these little fuckers! The kids hate me, the parents hate me..." She choked back a sob. "I'd better not say any more." Then she swallowed and looked over her shoulder at the projection on the white screen behind her desk. "I'm learning all the countries of the Middle East. Somehow I never got around to that before."

One of the things I like about working at the school is this cat that lives in town, with some residence adjacent to the school. He's a hefty cream-colored fellow, and I've known him since he was a kitten. One evening (sigh...when I still worked evenings), I looked up from my work vacuuming a classroom in a room slightly below grade, there to see this half-grown cat watching me. As I pushed the wand of the vacuum back and forth over the carpet, he followed my actions with the full motion of his head, back and forth. When I saw him watching me I thoughtlessly stopped and laughed out loud. He looked startled and hastily ran off. In subsequent years, he continues to patrol the grounds, always walking a route around the school building. When I come in to shovel snow before the kids arrive, I will invariably see his tracks ringing the building, passing every exit, under every window. When he was a kitten, he had a brother, a black and white fellow with a bib. I know this because they used to travel together and I asked their owner, a middle schooler in town, what their names were. She told me and I forgot. Wanting to have a name to call them by, I asked the middle schooler's mother for clarification. She looked at me quizzically. "We don't have a cat," she said. I don't know what ever happened to the brother. Probably the kid's mother doesn't know, either.

2012

I told my mother that my New Year’s resolution is to embrace my dark side.

She was not amused.

I hope you all had a good holiday, Hogswatch or other. As dad waited despairingly for me to post on here I got distracted with Various Things. Now though, it’s the eve of my return to college for my final semester and I could expound at great length about being 21 and having the world and my fingertips* etc. However, the speakers on the computer keep making a strange hissing/spitting noise even though I’m not on any site or program that has sound anywhere. (I did stumble across a site with an eerie tune floating around it while I was looking for good pictures of Shelob** but that was a while ago). I can only assume that  it’s aliens trying to communicate with the household.  They’re probably really looking for my father, who has always had an affinity for outer-space types. They will be disappointed as he is (wisely) sleeping, and I really feel I ought to log off so I don’t accidentally say or type something offensive. Best to leave first contact to the experts.

Still, I would like to wish everyone the best in 2012, belated though I may be.



*Student loans aside
**Being an RA doesn’t put me in nearly as many strange situations as being a piper does, but it has its small moments.