The End of Term

"In the summer," Wendy began her final paper for my class on nature writers, "I wake up at seven, eat oatmeal with blueberries, and leave the house on my purple bicycle, wearing a sweatshirt to protect myself from the cold morning air. I ride past tobacco barns and through tobacco fields, sometimes taking my hands off the handlebars to clap and scare a flock of crows into flight. I climb to the top of a giant green hill that was once the city dump but is now covered in wildflowers. I bike fast and get to work before the blueberry farm opens, so I can pin up the bird nets before customers arrive. Everyone talks to me. Old men give me advice about the future. Children talk about how many berries they've picked. Everybody describes their families, their dogs, and their vacations to Maine. For some reason in the middle of the dewy grass and steadily rising July sun, people want to know their neighbors."

The end of the semester is melancholy. Just as I begin to know the students in my classes, they vanish: Wendy amid the blueberries, the boy who paid for his schooling by teaching yoga in New Haven, a professional skateboarder, the two fishing guides, and a girl who had "always" wanted to be a lawyer but who suddenly was unsure and asked plaintively, "What should I do with the rest of my life?" "Talk to your parents," I suggested. "Mother doesn't care what I do," the girl replied, "and I haven't seen my father since I was eight." I've taught for forty years, and the girl's response was more expected than surprising. I looked out my office window. Lilac and autumn olive were sweet in the air. Azaleas were red with horns, and chimes of silver bells shook then fell silently to the ground. A larch glowed, its limbs the base lines of diagrammed sentences, its new needles flusters of spiky adjectives and adverbs. In distant yards violets wavered fragile and pale while bugle rose in single blue notes. In the damp leafy woods beyond Horsebarn Hill ferns thrust into unravelings, and Jacks preached from scores of hooded green pulpits. Along the banks of granite streams red trillium curtsied demure and humble while in quiet eddies marsh marigolds burst into bright youthful yellow.

After two girls handed in their last papers at the same time, one lingered in my office. "That girl lives near me," the student said, describing the girl who left. "She's nice, and she eats lots of beets." "My word," I said. "Yes," the girl added as she, too, turned to leave the room, "lots of beets. You can't imagine how many beets." I started reading an essay written by a boy majoring in biology. In the paper the boy traced the life spans of endoparasites infesting cats. Cats, he wrote, for example, excreted the eggs of toxoplasma gondii. The parasite changed the behavior of rodents who fed on the feces of infected cats, making them less wary, even drawing them toward cat urine, increasing the likelihood of their being eaten by cats. Once inside a cat the toxoplasma spawned, the animal eventually excreting the parasite's eggs, continuing, as the boy phrased it, "the happy cycle of life." "Heavens," I said aloud, pausing to open a box on my desk.

The last book students read for my course was Walden. The reading coincided with the opening of a restaurant near campus, one specializing in breakfasts and hamburgers, supplemented by a menu of sweet asides, the most striking being deep-fried Oreo cookies. Thoreau wrote that he was determined to know beans, though one day he spiced up a meal with fricasseed woodchuck. The Oreos provided an occasion for me to bounce from Thoreau's "simplicity" into a sermon dragging the shallows of the streams in which we went "a-fishing" and eating. In a fashion, my preaching took. To the final class meeting Jessica brought forty deep fried Oreos. "Perhaps you should try one," she suggested. "Thank you," I said and then [End Page...