Heaven

May is always a tough month for my goals. The end of classes and post planning always takes a phenomenal amount of time and energy. It's all necessary though. Sometimes I long for my dream of sitting in a musty library by myself and reading.

It's not practical.

One of the exercises I take my freshmen through is a descriptive writing on "Heaven". It's linked to a poem that we read about a woman describing snow to her mother who has never lived anywhere but the tropics. Her mother is dying and having been warm or hot all her life, she envisions Heaven as being someplace peaceful and cold blanketed in snow.

When the kids talk about heaven there's a lot of conversation about clouds if they are religious and a lot of half panicked looks if they are not. So this leads to a conversation about ideals and perfect places and that these ideals are personal to the individual. From there I get descriptive essays on everything from dance studios to beaches to mountain forests.

The point of this is that different things confer peace to different people. For me, I'd be in a big room filled with overstuffed couches and books. Hundreds of books of all types, but heavy on the fiction. There would be a cat and an endless supply of coffee. It would be quiet but not silent. I'd get bored eventually...but it would be a nice retreat.