The Return to Room 24

Teachers were cleared, under strict guidelines and intimidating protocols, to re-enter the school to clean out our classrooms.  This was not something that I was looking forward to...returning to a hollow room filled with the scattered evidence of our abruptly interrupted lives. In my mind, I likened it to the frozen-in-time effects of Pompeii. Archaeologists would stumble on this site and speculate, What happened here? Where are the children?

I didn't sleep the night before...picturing my classroom. Four walls. Windows. Desks. Chairs. Stop being a baby, Amy! It's just a job, for goodness sake! Morning arrived and I made the familiar drive...dreading every passing mile. The hushed hallway was dark as I approached my door...still assaulted with sparkles from my March War with Erin. My parade of decorated dachshunds had been bagged up like mortuary corpses. The helium balloon tied to my pencil mug lay deflated and defeated amongst half-corrected papers. The song reverberating through my mind was "Dearly Departed" and I hummed it as I slowly roamed the room. "You and I both know that the house is haunted/And you and I both know that the ghost is me."

I looked at my Agenda Board, barely recognizing my own handwriting. Monday, 3/16/2020. I felt a
compulsive need to erase it...that date didn't exist for me anymore. I swiped the eraser over the numbers but it refused to budge. I pressed down harder but the date was stuck...just like us. Through my tears, I glanced at the clock. How interesting that the minutes continue to move but the days don't. I had a video conference call scheduled with my boys followed by another meeting with my girls. I rolled my comfy teacher chair to the center of the room and brought up the call on my mobile SMARTboard and one-by-one, my boys arrived...tousled hair and smiling. We talked and teased and were together in Room 24...I was no longer haunted by ghost children as my goof-balls infused the room with light and life and energy. I had barely said good-bye to the boys when my girls came careening in, giggling and so excited to see one another. One of my honeys was so intent on NOT missing our meeting that she conducted her call from a moving car! For a few minutes, I wasn't alone. We were together and I could breathe again.

Of course it would snow as I got about the weird business of cleaning out desks in May. I solved the mystery of the missing white boards as I unearthed two, sometimes three, nestled among the sets of worn notebooks and folders. Another scheduled appointment offered me a built-in break from this dreary process, filming  a silly project introduction for a student on-line lesson. And then I was back at bagging up the interrupted education of my 4th graders. Before I felt, too heavily, the burden of each load I lifted, I was visited by another apparition...in the form of a delivered letter. A ghost of a 4th grader from the past, who described, in detail...down to our classroom custom of clapping a warm welcome for guests...how much our time together, those many years ago, had meant to him. A friendly reminder that it's NOT just a job. It's my family. And that it's okay to feel the pain of interwoven lives suddenly ripped apart. I wasn't done. This is not how you "wrap things up." Not in plastic bags. Set out, curbside, for pick-up.

My 4th graders...my sweet cherubs...my treasures. Your presence is a reverberating echo in this empty room...it is an ache that I feel in my haunted heart. How is it possible that the kids with whom I spent the shortest amount of time will end up staying with me the longest?