I dropped Macy Gray in there because my last blog was a bit funky.  Ok, it was a lot funky.  I was cranky, tired, and more than a little scared as to what I saw as I looked in the reflection in the mirror.

We live in an incredible part of Iowa.  I grew up about an hour south of our current home and we had gentle rolling hills, but I could see seven miles to the town where my high school was located.  Gentle rolling hills, but still, pretty dang flat.  Where I live now is this amazing assortment of limestone bluffs, deep river valleys, and trees all over the place, a place where the glaciers didn’t flatten, but this place where you drive around thinking “is this really Iowa??”  The reason I say all this is because not only do we have this amazing landscape here, but we have an amazing independent radio station, KDEC, that for the most part, does a great job of playing music I won’t hear on any Top 40 station.  Some days are better than others, but that’s true with any independent radio station.  

I say all this because my last blog was pretty bleak, but as I continue my writing here, I’ve found that’s ok.  This isn’t meant to be a unicorns and rainbows kind of place, but a place where I can write about it all: family, education, learning, poo, whatever comes to mind!  As I posted that blog on Friday, I think I may have finally shown the eight people who read this thing (thanks Mom!) that the time had come to move on.

But then a couple of things happened:

First, Macy Gray came on my KDEC.  Now, I was first introduced to Macy Gray through the Black Eyed Peas on the song and the song “Request Line”, a great song in its own right.  She’s got this smoky, jazz voice that is a throwback to a different era.  Anyway, the song, “There’s Beauty In The World” has been on my iPod for a long time, but it just seemed to come at that right time.  Listening to that voice, the fog/mist rolled through our place and it just made things seem right in the world.

Second, a teacher friend emailed me totally out of the blue, quoting a couple of the things that I’d said in my blog and how she was right there with me.  The last sentence got me though: “I don’t know if this matters to you or not, but I have total faith in what you do with/for kids. ”

Whoa.

For a friend to say that, wow.  I’ll admit, I’m a sap and tear up for the dumbest things, but things really got me, and in a good way.  I have 30 students this year and they are going to be a handful, no doubt, but I can do this.  They are a beautiful, energetic, sometimes obnoxious group (I can say that, I saw them last year!), but after Day 1, I can see the joy in their eyes about being here and desire to do great things.  How can I find the positive in that?  We will have our issues, I have no doubt about that, but I can see the beauty that is this class, that is coming to school doing a job that I love with the most dedicated staff in the country.  How can I go wrong with this? 🙂

So, in closing, thank you.  Thank you for reading this blog.  While it may not always seem like it, I pour a lot of me into this.  Thank you, email friend, your words meant more than you could ever know.

And thank you Macy Gray, because there is beauty in the world.  Sometimes, we just need to nudge to get us to realize it!