Barbara D. Katz-Brown

By Monica Gullotta I want to smile. I promise. It's just hard these days because of the political divide, wars, environmental decline, and the residual effects of COVID-19 lingering on. Then a switch goes off in my brain, I have agency. I can think about something else rather than cascading into a never-ending vortex playing havoc on my mind. But where do I begin? And how do I start? I look at the ceiling. I look at the floor. Waiting patiently, twiddling my thumbs when a spider comes along.

The phone rang at 11:30 p.m. in late August. I was already in bed, slowly drifting to sleep. I picked up the phone. It was my daughter. I could hear the desperation in her voice as she was trying to speak. “The School Superintendent just made school online for the first half of the year.” “Mom, how am I going to work my full-time job at home online, teach my 1st grader, entertain my preschooler and take care of everything else?”  She broke down sobbing. “I didn’t plan to be a teacher. I can’t do this.

The 70 year old woman held the paperback book, “Ithaca: A Brief History” by Carol Kammen in her hands as she sat on the bus. Several of the passages in the book had been underlined and the pages dog-eared, helping her remember the small city she loved, as she was working and living far away.