Last June, two days after the hardest year of my ten-year teaching career – a year that tore my emotions to shreds and made me forget the feeling of joy – I started writing a book.  The protagonists had been hanging out in my mind for over a month by that point. I don’t mean that I had been brainstorming characters with the intention to write a novel. On the contrary, despite no current plans to write anything at all, these characters just showed up one day in my brain. Over the course of several weeks, their lives unfolded in my imagination as I washed dishes or drove to work.…

October 31st, 2022: Halloween I realize my assistant principal’s soft-spoken voice is muffling through the intercom, mixing into the Oaxacan music, drowning in children’s joyful chatter. The tone is too calm to draw my attention; I figure I’ll just get class started and check my email at the same time in case I missed something.  I’m reading Octavio Paz’s death poem when they tell me we have to get out. “Do we take our stuff, Profe Klein?” students ask, their eager eyes looking to me for direction. “Nope, we just go,” I reply matter-of-factly, stupidly leaving all of my stuff behind as well – phone, jacket, keys. I do remember…

I curved and weaved through the woods, passed a lush mountain peppered with paragliders, and wondered if I would ever arrive. My new commute was further than I expected. My stomach flip-flopped as I parked and walked cautiously into a very old school building.  I was greeted by a woman in a long dress, her hair in two simple braids at the sides of her warm, gentle face. Her spirit was the spitting image of my Auntie Kathleen, a woman who spent the majority of her retired life clipping out newspaper articles and writing letters to everyone she knew on scraps of recycled paper.  I was enveloped in a strong,…

I am undecided on coffee. I go through phases. The thought of a homemade latte in the morning gets me out of bed with a flutter of hope rippling through my stomach. The caffeine is a burst of joy. It expands in my chest as I softly sing along to Lady Gaga on my morning commute, a rainbow of every shade of green flashing past my window. The energy tingles down my fingertips and my brain buzzes with new ideas for lesson plans, pieces together poetic phrases, makes the untenable reality of a working mom in 2022 feel completely and totally doable. Sometimes the tingling becomes too intense. It starts…

Hey everyone! I wrote this story for my family to capture a few of the beautiful memories we have shared together over the years. 🙂 My childhood is filled with memories from my aunt and uncle’s dining room table. My Aunt Nancy seated on one end, elegantly holding a glass of red wine; my Uncle Gordon on the other end, talking. Discussing politics, telling stories from childhood, theorizing about this and that. Always authoritative and articulate. In between my sophisticated aunt and eloquent uncle, the rest of us filled out the long, formal dining room table with our ridiculous shenanigans. Fiddling with the antique “Happy Birthday” jack-in-the-box, which my little…

It’s 11:00pm and I’m stuffing leftover Halloween Skittles into my mouth by the handful. I just finished the dishes after waiting an hour and a half for my kids to fall asleep. The piles of dishes from yet another mediocre meal, not because I don’t cook well but because we’ve already eaten this meal – we’ve eaten all the meals, over and over and over again since March 2020. And I’m too tired to find a new recipe and my brain is too overloaded to remember to purchase a new ingredient. And the piles of dishes from the lunch tuppers and the kids’ water bottles and the tuppers and tuppers…

“I decided not to eat my salad today,” my colleague says to me at lunch with a big smile. She’s eating her salad, forkful of lettuce halfway up to her mouth as she says this. I smile at her, waiting for my brain to catch her meaning. It doesn’t, so I end up just staring at her for one long second. She realizes I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Oh! You must not have been in here yet yesterday when I heated my salad.” “OH!” chimes in our other colleague. “I though you said, ‘I decided not to EAT my salad’ and I thought, isn’t she eating it…

One day, about four years ago, a student approached me at the end of class and gave me a big hug. In the moment it felt normal and natural, but it was actually quite out of the blue. In Kindergarten, this might be a common occurrence, but I teach 8th graders. To be honest, I will never really know why she gave me that hug. I remember very little about that class period. I think we had a conversation before class in which I extended grace related to making up an assignment after an extended absence. I also vaguely recall leading a class discussion related to culture and discrimination, though…

It was true that the sunrise reflected off the mountain’s concave surface in waves of purple and pink. But superimposed in front of the mountain was a line of bodies, A perfect line along the ice cold metal railing, Each clutching a camera in a death grip, aimed defiantly at the sun. The first rays trickled slowly out from the clouds, then began to spring up at exponentially increasing speeds, And they would have blinded us all had we not been shielded by the lenses of our video recorders. The texture hidden moments before in the dark concave of the volcano came alive, Revealing polka dot spots of rocks and…