I came home today and vacuumed.  It’s what I do when it’s too hot to do my weed (as in the garden) therapy.

Both of these tasks can be accomplished with mindlessness, movement, and muteness. And they both provide a sense of completion. After not so much time, I can step back and actually see what I’ve accomplished.

This “job well done” satisfaction rarely happens in teaching. And with less than two weeks of school (including exam days), job well done is redefined as ending the year without poking my eyes out with a red pen.

For reasons primarily related to job security, I’ll not disclose why I arrived home today and wondered if I should consider a new profession, one for which I may be highly qualified. Like arranging the candy bars by the grocery store checkouts.

It’s not helping my emotional sanity thermometer that Sunday is Mother’s Day.  My mother died over twenty years ago, and I miss, so deeply miss, being her daughter. The conversations of my friends discussing mom’s day gifts and gatherings bore a hole in my heart, and the memories of my mother spill out and soak themselves in longing.

When I read this poem by Billy Collins, I wish I could see her just long enough to say, “Thank you.”

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.