A Teacher's Reward

    In early August I got a phone call from a former student, Karina, whom I had taught not in my college classes but in a multi-age class at an alternative school in the Applegate in the 1980s.

Karina (center) and me in clothes we had made and with 
masks and cloths we had printed for a unit on Africa.

Now she is a grown woman, of course, with her own marriage and children and a home in Trinidad, California.

    Karina had read my book of poems about Mike (From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years) and liked it so much she just picked up the phone and called me, regardless of our not having been in touch for decades. I was so glad to hear from her! We talked for a long time, about Mike and about her son, who had died earlier that same year. Karina urged me to visit her in Trinidad.

    So I did.

    I met her daughter, Olivia, who is my granddaughter's age. (Her husband wasn't home.) We did some hikes together and she cooked some great meals and we talked and shared stories and laughed about the past, and it was all so much fun she called her sister, Laurel, after I had left to tell her about it. 

    Laurel had been my student, too.

Laurel is in the center. 1981

She had been in many of the plays I wrote and produced with the Applegate Youth Theater. She lives in Portland now. She was enchanted with Karina's tales of our time together and told Karina she would love for me to visit her, too.

    So, last week, I did.

    Laurel met me at the door with a big smile. She looked beautiful in a dark print dress. I would have known her anywhere—that same gorgeous black hair, that beautiful dimple in the right cheek, those bright eyes, that bubbly smile. She offered me tea and fresh-from-the-oven banana bread. Her husband, Brandon, and teen-age daughter, Ursula, sat with us at the table. Stories flew back and forth—about the plays Laurel was in with the Applegate Youth Theater, about their travels in France, about my graduate school days. All three of them made me feel completely welcomed and loved. I was charmed and touched and warmed all over again by how much I loved Laurel.

    If Karina had made that connection for me, the other person from those days, whom I hadn't seen for thirty years, made the connection on her own. Kelly, the same age as my son, Ela, had grown up on this same isolated mountainside I live on still. She was often at my house during those times, and if she was something of a surrogate daughter to me, I was a fill-in mother when she needed me, too.

Kelly, is second from the left, bottom row. Ela is to her right.
I am behind her, to her left. Horizon School. 1981.

    It was a wonderful reunion with Kelly. I met her husband and two sons, and she urged me to visit her on her farm near Portland. She invited me to the grape-crush party they have every year at harvest season.

    So while I was in Portland to visit Laurel and other friends, I visited Kelly, too, at her beautiful farm outside of Portland. She, too, made me feel loved and welcomed, and, as with Laurel and Karina, I loved seeing her as a mature woman—her competence, the tastefulness with which she decorated her house, the hospitality with which she served her guests, who all went home with jars of grape juice. I loved being in her gardens and in her charming guest house.

    The care with which Karina, Kelly, and Laurel welcomed me into their adult lives touched me to the core. Karina showing me special places on the coast, Kelly loading me with gifts, Laurel's beautiful dress and banana bread and wanting her husband and daughter to know me, too—I was deeply touched by these gestures. Teachers like to think they have had an influence on their students, but, of course, we rarely get to know whether that's true. Here were three instances of reconnecting with students whom I had loved when they were children and whom I loved all over again, knowing them as adults. In those reunions, in the enthusiasm these women expressed for seeing me again, in our tales of our shared pasts, I felt that our teacher-student relationship had been as meaningful to them as it had been to me, a relationship that has now matured into a lasting friendship between adults.