Down here after Nature's squally rebuke for taking her winter for granted, we have to trudge around in pine shoes instead of snow shoes. The streets are in disarry, still shrewn with the remnants of an inundating pine cone and spanish moss slide. As I gingerly stepped along my new route, questioning my intelligence and education, I took the risk of looking up through the opaque, slushy tears in my eyes. In this frozen moment, Valdosta seemed depopulated, abandoned. The tan monochrome blur dulled everything's distinctive lines.
Nothing seems noticeable.
Everything consequently seemed to withdraw, droop, shrivel, and slink away with a quilty sense of unworthiness. That sight and a consoling conversation I had had with a disraught student yesterday threw a thought, a very personal thought, across my shivering mind. Don't loudly berate. Just ignore that student, let him or her go unnoticed. See through him or her as if he or she doesn't exist.