First Session

It's from a poem called "Requiem," by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's an epitaph for a gravestone. But it suits me.

Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

...but I'm not home to stay. It's not a death. In fact, it is new life. Another life, maybe. It's a respite. It's a temporary rest. I am home, and it soaks into my bones and softens my skin and fills my eyes and wells up from my center and spills over my edges. I'm home - in the deepest, most personal sense, I'm home.

Are there people in the world who do not settle into the academic world as if they are seedlings being well-watered in? I'm home, I'm home, I'm home. In a classroom old enough to have chalkboards (not white boards) on three walls, and one of those with sliding boards so that it is possible to pull one in front of the others -- in a room with open windows and a fan instead of air conditioning -- in a room I can get to by the wide, main, front stairs or the narrow, more steep and slightly creaking stairways at the ends of the hall -- last night, in class again, I came home.