“Courage, Nicholas,” I tell him, “You have what it takes.”

“No worries,” I say to my student who forgot his online tutoring lesson. “Pas de probléme. I’ve had five seniors. I know what that looks like.” And I did and I do. He is banging out college apps and common apps and living the life of an insanely strapped and over tasked senior in high school. He was supposed to come online at 7, but the minutes tick by in the Zoom room. Me and crickets. And them not so good with the grammar. And none of them speaks French. After about 10 minutes I log off and go about my night.

The empty next, I have discovered, is only enjoyable from some rooms of the house. Others, not all. The bathrooms are most pleasurable. Cleaned once, they stay that way. No toothpaste anywhere but in the tube on the counters, no counters looking privy to a mud-slinging contest. Or like you’re in the middle of a remodel and suddenly decided to take a shower. Maybe the garage, too. The garage of an empty nest is very nice, indeed. No half done projects, piles and drops of stuff they’ll never claim. Broken universe. But the kitchen?? The fridge? Deadly. Don’t go in there right away. Oddest urge to scramble some eggs, make pancakes, fix a big spaghetti dinner for a full table. (See A Fatted Calf – July 2019).

We got caught off guard on that one. With our last inhabitant stocked up for the Armageddon on cereal bars, snack crackers, and protein powder, we are left holding the proverbial bag. He also happened to eat a lot of cereal–at times, a box per sitting. And who wants to throw out all this food ? Bill, no lie, has been eating pizza leftovers for 10 days now. Frozen pizza. The kind you might be better served to eat the box and chuck the pizza. You shoulda seen his face when I produced a “special” lunch the first Saturday after Will left. Marveling at it. “Hot pockets??! Gosh, wow! I haven’t eaten a hot pocket in years.” Get used to it buddy, I think.

The dining room is probably the worst. 136 Birthdays, numerous special dinners, holiday parties, that table has seen it all. No one’s delivered a baby on it or laid out a body for an Irish wake, but every other life milestone here, in this room. Now it sits in stillness. A pass-through of defeat, somewhere to drop the mail or start a large colony of paper piles, randomly placed about like prairie dog holes.

This is why tutoring is good for me right now. Filling in the gaps and holes. Twenty-seven students each week, breezing through the front door (the older ones come in without knocking, like it’s their place, because I have the earlier class still in session). They spread out, break stuff, lose stuff, leave stuff behind. They trash the dining room floor in a matter of days, no different than a real classroom. It is a real classroom. I have two white boards, a rolling cart of teacher gear, a lending library organized by grade in the living room. The olders wait for the youngers in my “reading room” and then they switch. I have 1st – 8th grade, with my first grader a solo and several 8th graders online. And then of course, poor Pierre, zee student of French. (Name changed, bien sur)

It did not start out as a class, although early on I heard it referred to as “Jennyclass,” and that is what it has become. It started as ESL tutoring, of all things, for a student who didn’t need it by a teacher who couldn’t do it. Mainly I coached T in grammar and made spelling flashcards for his first-grade brother and we went on like that weekly at the library where I once had worked. A former colleague had given out my name as a tutor for this family who wanted their son to apply (and get in) to a prestigious high school in our area. Kid got in. I got calls. Lots of calls. We outgrew our library rental space, and when Will was here I was often car-less, so the happy school-at-home made sense. (See Zoom School – September 2020)

Now there are 27 of them in person, and three online. Weekly. Their bright little voices brittle as tea cups. One of them has wrists thinner than a goblet stem. What do we write about? Well life, for heaven’s sake. Just look at them. They come through the door with their swim lessons, their Reading Olympics, soccer teams, girl scout cookies. A couple come in the tell-tale white suits for martial arts. Do any of them have swim suits on under their clothes, as ours had to do during those middle and high school thing-a-minute years? (See Swimming the 500 – December 2019). Their bright-eyed, ebullient, busy lives. Talk about the circle of life. Throw down a persuasive writing essay and 99.9% of middle school and above will argue for a cell phone. The universality of it warms me like a winter coat. I bear witness to it, right here in my well-peopled house. I may have lost three children, or five, but I have gained back dozens. (See Enchantée – December 2021).

Nest?? What nest? You mean this old heap of sticks and twigs? That ain’t a nest, that’s kindling. Our nest isn’t empty so much as, well, blown apart. (See A Crucible – October 2025). Good ol’ Burk Motel. Thirty years, five kids, multiple pets (including some outside of the species mammal), nine vehicles—It’s a wonder we are still standing. Bus driver Bill, of course, is in his 10th year of driving a school bus as a “side gig.” He sees these same kids or their counterparts. We are both getting an education about what it means to be young in the world. Today’s world. And we, in turn, have an education to share.

Because they are from Indian families in a fast growing population in our area, there are things that delight and things beyond their experience. Unexpected, easy things. They don’t know what licorice is, for one. Pets, for two. By and large their integration does not include pets. Our old dog and cat are as exciting this week as they were last semester. Second, anything old. Older than the 40ish years of their parents. Everything in their world is brand new. So my old furniture and our “collectibles” fascinate them. It delights me down to my star stickers to think of these relatively new little people sitting on my grandmother’s rickety Victorian side chairs learning verb tenses and object pronouns.

If they can get me derailed I digress into stories about snow days long ago and what it was like when I was young. It sounds so cliché, I know, but it feels SO good. An empty nest is just what it sounds like: repository-less. Nowhere, you will relate, to put stuff. Nothing nobody needs. Children spend the first half of their lives not wanting your guidance, the next half not wanting your wisdom, and the last half not wanting your stuff. (Hey, I didn’t say I taught math.) In the hardest times these students have been a balm and a comfort. Some days, their sweet little voices keep me going. The endearing and breathless exuberance of children. Little packaged bipedal reminders of what it was like to be young in this house. I may got their nouns and verbs, but they got my raison d’être upon which all is predicated.

Perhaps in the end it is all about acceptance. Belonging. I like to encourage them in ways the culture doesn’t, affirm them in ways the system won’t, see them in ways perhaps their own parents can’t. Not yet. These are people in the process of becoming, and I hold that as most magical. Courage, mes étudiants. My dining table is a fine place to find your voice, and I’ll give you the good solid grammar to go with. Perhaps then, this learning, this educational endeavor, has always been about acceptance. Approval. The timeless desire to measure up in the eyes of another. Heaven’s to Rosy. I’ve just travelled north for three days before Christmas to my own “alma mater,” so to speak, looking for the same.

Today in writing class we are describing the woods. We’ve read some Jan Brett and we’ve read a magical edition of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” By some Christmas miracle there is snow in my woods. So we talk about the stillness and the horse’s breath and the moonlight that would be filtering through the trees. We play the synonym game. We talk about the theme. The deliberate word choice. The pacing. And yes, of course, the figurative language. Hanover County curriculum and its figurative language. They tell me they’ve never been in the woods at night. I put that on the tutoring bucket list, like the ice cream party and the tree fort building we shall have next spring.

It is good to keep alive the belief in these becomers. The world seems to have gone stark raving mad. It is so un-good out there these days. But children? Children are good. The renewal and the permanence of what felt then (in our full-nest days) like just crazy flux is not lost on me. The empty nest is real, people. Got a lifetime supply of honey nut Cheerios and a perfectly good helicopter going begging in the garage. Child rearing is not for sissies or the faint of heart. (See Landing the Helicopter – May 2020, or Carry On – May 2020, or Hanging On – September 2020). And when we’re “done” (Are we ever done?) we have questions the years can’t answer. At the end of the day what I want said is I stayed the course. I never gave up. I honored the good and held on through the rest, and I never. ever. gave. up. Children are a moveable promise. And I have miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep.

So I don’t know where Garçon le ghost has got to, my student, but maybe he will be back on for French lessons in the new year. We are reading Le Petit Prince, he and I. Ellie is home this holiday, from Italy. Miracle of miracles she kept the ticket we booked at rock bottom prices this past summer and got on the plane. Or barely got on the plane, as the harrowing tale goes. Her suitcase hung out an extra day in London Heathrow and still hasn’t shown up at our door. She is one semester away from a Master’s in Archeological Sciences at Padua University. Fourth oldest university in the world. Kids been coming home from that college for 800 years. Wonder if Galileo’s mom got as pumped as I do.

Sophie is in Durham, studying at Duke Divinity, working as a chaplain, and engaged to be married next spring. Clearly we’ve put such a positive spin on marriage and family she wants a piece of it herself [weeping smiley face emoji here]. Will is in Alabama living with a bunch of guys in a Christian community doing mission work along with outdoor stuff and some indoor stuff, if you know what I mean. Interior reboot, coming into his own. And God our Heavenly father, without a doubt the most tired parent of them all? Well, I believe God is his holy temple, smiling away. “Seee?” He tells me, “I told you a child would fix it.”

Miss Jenny’s Grammar Challenge—

Find in this essay, if you will – alliteration (4), assonance (2), hyperbole (2), litotes (1), personification (2), simile (4) and metaphor (2).

You will also find appositives (4), multiple fragments (why not, been a broken year), a couple of allusions (2) and one run-on for good measure.