Closing Up Shop

I have been avoiding today for awhile now because I knew when I emptied their lockers and took off their name tags it would make it feel final. It would make it feel like they were gone already, when really it should be a time of celebration. A time of field trips and field days, extra recesses and celebrations of final testing. I avoided today like a bad dream or a trip to the dentist. I’ll do it some other time, I would tell myself. I will get them their pencil boxes and books some other time, when I am ready, when I am not so sad. Today, I walked into my classroom and the sadness immediately found it’s way in. I had built up such a protective wall of good vibes, and coffee and exercise induced endorphins. And still, the sadness found its way in to all the vulnerable parts of myself. Do you know what it’s like to walk past an abandoned rocking chair, with no teacher at it and zero kids sitting around her feet. To see a March calendar draped in shamrocks and rainbows, when tomorrow is actually May? To go through kids pencil boxes, where they have written little notes to each other and to me. To sift through writing papers, where their learning is imprinted right there on the page, frozen in time, abandoned since that Friday when we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

I did as much as I could for as long as I could. I photocopied and organized. I stuffed and re-organized. I frog stamped each envelope and put my address on the front, hoping to hear from some, who I haven’t heard from since that day in March. I don’t want them to buy the stamp, I did that, I don’t want them to look for me, I did that, I just want to open my mailbox and see their sloppy writing going sideways across a ripped page from Mom’s grocery shopping list. I want to run my fingers over the emoji they drew at the bottom and listen for their voice coming out of the page right into my ears. It is hard to make a packet that pleases everyone. I’m not worried about pleasing everyone anymore. I was in the beginning. Now I’m just trying to help them make it through. I can send the cutest worksheets, I can send the best stickers, but none of it takes away from the fact that they still are doing the heavy lifting with half of the resources. It doesn’t take away from the fact that some of their families will be returning to work, and in essence helping them less and increasing their load. Each of my 20 have a pineapple cutout on their locker, beautifully decorated from my student teacher at the start of the year. I took off all the pineapples and separated them out on my carpet. Putting their books into piles and spilling their broken crayons in the trash. By the time I got to the seventh kid, I couldn’t take the quiet. The packets were full and my job was done but the room was empty and I just missed the sounds. I missed the chair scrapings that used to make me grit my teeth, I missed their giggles , I missed their knock knock jokes, I missed hearing Scott mowing the lawn outside and me reaching for my claritin, I even missed that drip drip of my broken faucet. I made an executive decision to take a break and come back on Monday when it was louder.