7:00 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday; even though the time change has wreaked havoc with my bio-rhythms, chickadees don't miss a beat, call to the sun no matter what my kitchen clock says). 9 degrees (52 degrees colder than Thursday afternoon), wind NW 15 mph. Sky: unremarkable, icy haze refracts sunlight, a gauzy screen that softens shadows, cuts down visibility, perverse insulation keeping the valley freezer-chest cold. Road ruts deep, solidified into miniature badlands or a caliche canyon above the Salt Fork of the Brazos River, southeast of Lubbock, Texas; nearly fifty years ago, aggressive, great horned owls evicted cliff-nesting barn owls from a caliche canyon. Barn owls nested elsewhere. Horned owls fledged chicks. And I dropped out of graduate school, a northeastern outcast . . . headed home, tail between my legs. Permanent streams: upper, transparent panes of frosted ice extend from both shores; lower, tightly bound, visions of January, a silent, languishing flow, news of the day repeated once too often. Wetlands: bleached-out pink clouds next to white on the color wheel. Snow glossy and cast-iron hard, had Hannibal led elephants across the marsh, they might not have sunk in. Pond: nothing new here.
Except for the lengthening day, winter doesn't incrementally progress toward spring: fits and starts and sadly disappointing backward trends. Birds seem puzzled by windchill. No drumming. Little singing. No grit-gathering along the driveway. Even the jays subdued. But five chickadees (always chickadees) tear through a tangle of vines. Hard to tell who's in charge. Positions repeatedly change ongoing activity, songbirds burning around the dooryard—black-capped adrenaline. Keeping warm, making social adjustments. Crow in the compost, filling up on my discarded dinners—linguini, omelet, stale cornbread—leans into an Arctic wind, fortitude in glossy black.
Again you teach me something new--"caliche". And when I found this site, there was a section on the Hohokam culture a culture, which flourished from 300 BCE until about 1400 CE. https://www.arizonamuseumofnaturalhistory.org/plan-a-visit/mesa-grande/look-closely
So while you may have dropped out of school, think of what you saw and learned--John Muir dropped out of the Univ. of Wisconsin. I'm a teacher and daughter of a college professor--but this pandemic has given me time to ponder what real LEARNING is--and it rarely happens in schools. I always turn to Einstein's idea of "holy curiosity":
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.’’ [quoted in, ‘’Death of a Genius–Old Man’s Advice to Youth: ‘Never Lose a Holy Curiosity,’’ Life Magazine 38, no. 18, (May 2, 1955): p. 64]. And he also warned: ‘’It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.’’ [quoted in The New York Times, March 13 1949, p. 34].