Author: Sharron Burnett

Tucked in the world news is the story that Harry and Meghan are returning to England where there children Archie and Lilibet will attend school. Not much is known about where they will actually live or why they decided to move from California. There has been much chatter in England where such intrigue is a bit more important given Harry’s relation to their king.

Most of the talk is somewhat negative, asserting that neither Harry nor Meghan have much to offer since they will not be participating in the service of the royal family the way William and Kate are doing. Their exit from the royal family a few years back led many Brits to angrily ostracize Harry while growing ever closer to his older brother. There is a great deal of bad blood and misunderstanding that needs to heal because both Harry and Meghan were quite vocal about the insults and insinuations that drove them away in the first place. 

I suppose because of my experience of suddenly losing a father in a car accident I have always felt a kind of kinship with Harry. I have garnered from his comments that he has never truly overcome the loss that he felt when his mother died. I believe that to a very large extent her death has never been resolved for him and as such he has been searching for a sense of peace that he believed he found in Meghan. 

Harry may have been young but he saw the emotional turmoil unfolding between his mother and father. He witnessed his mother’s sorrow and anxiety and somehow understood that the ultimate tragedy of her life came because of the hounding of the press that never ceased. She was like a bug under the microscope of publicity that made her life a kind of mockery. Everyone knew about her husband’s calls to Camilla. None of it was secret. She was followed everywhere and those who knew her saw the toll it was taking on her. All the while she conveyed her motherly love to her sons and Harry fondly remembers her devotion even as he struggles in knowing how difficult life was for his mother. 

I suppose that Harry has been searching for his own identity for much of his life. He was not trained to be anything other than a prince who attended events and smiled to keep the royal family in favor. He seemingly enjoyed his time in the military more than anything because when he was there he had a purpose. Eventually he met Meghan and he took her camping in Africa where he found peace and joy. I suppose that he never imagined how much the public would focus on his marriage and how it would remind him of the furor that had haunted his mother. 

Meghan is an American. We do things differently here. She did not truly understand her duties or how she was supposed to act. Nobody really helped her to understand and when she made mistakes they held her accountable. The clash of cultures was amplified by the rules of royalty and the fact that the wife of a prince is not supposed to do and say certain things. It was not only a repressive life style but it was invasive as well much in the same way it had been for Diana. Eventually Harry became very defensive for his wife no doubt because as a little boy he had seen what ultimately happened to his mother. 

I have often wondered how it is possible for William and Harry to love their father knowing how tragically he treated their mother. The fact that the woman who broke Diana’s heart is now the queen consort has to be a thorn in Harry’s side and yet he has tried to stay as close as possible with his father. He is no doubt torn in his emotions. He needed his father after his mother was gone and the two of them formed an attachment to each other. Nonetheless the feelings that Harry expresses in his book and in his interviews all point to unresolved sorrow, something that the general public seems unwilling to understand. 

The royal family in England has a history of imperfections and that incudes the most recent monarchs. Queen Elizabeth’s uncle fell in love with a married woman and abdicated rather than pushing her away. Queen Elizabeth was a faithful and dutiful monarch without much room for welcoming nontraditional ways of living. I suspect that the entire family would have benefited from counseling given that even Prince Andrew is an embarrassment to the crown. Their unwillingness to face the emotional cost of pretending that nothing is wrong has resulted in the chaos that still haunts the family. Perhaps it is finally time for the whole group to modernize and work out the many issues that have plagued them for decades. Welcoming Harry and Meghan just as they are would be a great start and might even inspire the press and the citizens to have compassion for their humanity instead of expecting them to bow in perfection. 

It is time for a more modern approach to royalty. Right now they are a business firm that exists in a world of publicity and public opinion that is incredibly uncomfortable. Diana attempted to make this known and now Harry is doing the same thing. It would be nice if everyone in Great Britain would embrace him and Meghan just as they are, respecting their attempts to live the way they wish. It really is all that any of us want from life. 

My mother often told me the story of how I was born on a cold day in November. She repeated the tale speaking of how she and my father were living in a garage apartment in the Heights neighborhood of Houston. She was nine months pregnant when a fall wind brought pecans to the ground from a huge tree on the property. She donned my father’s wool army coat and sat down among the leaves to fill a paper sack with the delicious nuts. In the middle of her task her contractions began so she climbed the stairs to her rented home and called my father at his work. He came as quickly as possible and drove her to Height’s Hospital where I was born a few hours later. 

Mama seemed to repeat that story at the same time each year when fall used to bring cooler temperatures to southeast Texas. She would smile in remembrance and as I listened I felt the love in each of her words. It would be years before I was old enough to envision how young she was on that day of my birth and how much I was part of her dreams for the future. Now that I am growing older I view my mother’s life story through the lens of maturity and understand more and more how much she wanted me to understand the love that she felt for me.

My mother-in- law would often tell a similar tale of the time when my husband was born. She outlined the details of his birth as though she was speaking of it for the very first time. When I was younger such stories like hers and my mom’s irritated because I heard them over and over again. I did not realize then how much we mothers cherish the moments when our children enter this world. We truly change in that magical moment when we bring a new life into the long history of being human. While it may seem to be only a natural occurrence we somehow understand the spirituality of that miracle that is repeated over and over again in places far and near. 

Upon the recent death of one of my former students those of us who knew her immediately thought of her husband and her children. We understood the great loss that they were feeling. It was only when I attended the rosary for her that my attention turned to her parents who seemed to be in a kind of stupor as they no doubt recalled every moment of their child’s life. I found myself wondering if the young woman’s mother was remembering the day on which her daughter was born. Did she think of those cries from her baby and remember the first time her child took a step and began the journey of walking away into her own adult life? As an older woman I felt her pain in a way that I had not before considered. Losing a child no matter what the age has to be devastating. 

I have yet to meet a woman who did not have an almost sacred bond with her offspring. There are of course exceptions but most of the time a mother is tied to her babies in a mystical way that never fades throughout time. We give our adult children the wings that they need to fly away but our thoughts are with them every single day even when they are far away. I suppose that those stories of birth that my mother and mother-in-law told again and again were their way of remembering the solemn duty that they lovingly embraced to be part of creating a new human being to walk among us on this earth. 

I still remember my grandmother telling me stories of my father after he had died. Even as a child I realized how much she missed him. I knew the toll that his death had taken on my mother but my grandmother showed me how her bond with him was just as intertwined with her life. She was never the same person that she had once been after he was gone. She carried on with her life with courage and folksy optimism but a bit of the light in her eyes disappeared with his passing. 

My mother once told me that my grandmother had confided to her that she has lost her parents, her first husband and her siblings but it was the death of her child that hit her the hardest. I suppose that over time I realized more and more why losing a child is so tragic even when that child is an independent adult. I have since spoken with friends and relatives who have endured such a thing and everyone of them says the same thing. They never quite get over the death of a child. 

We humans tend to believe that there is a certain way that life should unfold. When the unthinkable happens it feels as though the whole universe has tilted and created a terrible catastrophe. Parenting never really ends even when we give our children the space that they need to become themselves. We think of them in the morning and before we fall asleep at night. We listen for their cries for help and worry when they seem to be awry. It is part of our nature as moms and no doubt as dads as well. 

Family bonds run deeply just as they should. We seem to be programed to watch over each other. Such feelings are part of every culture, every religion, every way of life. We are united in loving our children which makes wars created by individuals and groups yearning for power feel so wrong. The ordinary people are mostly wanting only to live their lives, take care of their families. War turns all of that atilt. 

For some reason I think of such things in this moment when the people of Ukraine are fighting for their freedoms after being invaded by Russia. I ponder the wars continuing in the Middle East. I know in my bones that mothers around the world only want their babies to be safe and wonder why we can’t find ways to live in peace. It should be more than just a mother’s dream to hope for an end to violence and loss and death. When will we ever learn?

It’s been so hot in my part of Texas for so many days that any thought of being outside is absurd. It only takes a short stroll from the car to the entrance of an air conditioned area to break into a massive sweat. I find myself anxiously longing for the slightly cooler days of October. I dream of the lovely climate of Maine when I visited there in late May and was able to participate in outdoor events without feeling as though I was on the verge of passing out. 

I am certain that climate change has indeed made summers in Texas far worse than they were when I was young but I still wish that I had the fortitude for laboring in the heat that I once possessed. I don’t know if my disdain for the high temperatures is the result of age or enjoying the luxury of air conditioning. What I do know is that the high temperatures don’t just annoy me. Of late they send me into a state of lightheadedness that tells my brain that I will literally faint if I don’t immediately cool down. 

When I was a child we visited my grandparents during the summer on their farm in Arkansas. They would rise early in the morning to tend their crops, feed their animals and milk their cow. By the time we woke up for breakfast they had already spent four or five hours taking care of business to insure that they would have a bumper crop of fresh fruit and vegetables for the winter but also to avoid working during the worst heat of the day. 

There was no air conditioning in their home but the house had been built in such a way that opening the right windows would create a breeze that cooled down the rooms on most days. They understood how to parse the hours of the day to make the most of the cool times for physical activities and then shut down in the afternoons when the sun became almost unbearable. Dealing with the clammy weather without appliances was something that my grandparents had done for all of their lives. 

I recall one day when the temperature was so high that it was even hard to breathe for us kids who were accustomed to running and playing all day long in the summer heat. In that moment my grandfather announced that we would go visit “the lady on the hill.” Of course I was immediately intrigued at the thought of an adventure and surely going to a place where a woman actually had a title like that made it all the more exciting. Besides riding in my grandfather’s car with the windows rolled down would at the very least create a breeze to blow over the sweat that was overtaking us. 

We climbed higher and higher on the road that lead from my grandparents’ home to the place where the mysterious sounding woman lived. Her property was the highest point in the tiny community and it was covered with the shade of trees that had been left in place to create a kind of oasis. Sitting under a big oak was an old woman so wrinkled that she appeared to be a hundred years old. She waved at my grandmother and grandfather as we exited the car and pointed to some chairs that seemed to be ready for our visit. We eagerly sat down immediately enjoying the coolness of the shade.

The old lady sat in a rocking chair holding a tuna fish can that she used to spit as she chewed on tobacco. While she seemed to have noticed that we had arrived she began telling a number of stories talking to herself as though she was the only person there. She mumbled and spat as though she was in some kind of trance. Now and again she would look at as like we were an apparition rather than a presence. I took my cues of how to act from my grandmother who would now and again touch my hand and smile at me as if the say that everything was quite normal and I should just enjoy the storytelling that the woman was providing us. 

Before long other people from the area arrived as though they understood that being there was part of a ritual on extremely hot days. Each time the lady would stop her speeches only long enough to wave the newcomers to the many chairs that stood under the trees. Then she would return to her performance of talking and spitting and telling tales that made no sense. 

Somehow I never felt uncomfortable in that situation. Instead I was entranced but I never really made sense of what I was witnessing. I only knew that the people there seemed to admire the lady and showed their appreciation of her with their silent attention to her soliloquy. Besides it was so cool in that place that I found myself feeling a bit enchanted. I surely had never before experienced a person like this woman in all of my short life and I knew in that moment that I would never forget her. 

Before long my grandparents decided that we needed to leave. More people were arriving and the seating was getting full. We had enjoyed our time getting cool and “visiting” with the lady and it was time to go home. Besides nature was calling one of my brothers and there was no bathroom on the property. In fact my grandmother explained on the way back to her home that theirs was the only house on the mountain that had indoor plumbing, a fact that astounded me. I had assumed that everyone in America enjoyed such modern conveniences and could not imagine anyone still wandering out to a pit in a little enclosure to relieve oneself. 

On the way back to my grandparent’s farm my grandmother schooled us in how the old time outhouses worked. She was always the supreme educator in spite of her illiteracy. I loved hearing about the whole process and the items that they used to be sanitary but had no desire to actually try such a system on my own. 

I have thought about that “lady on the hill”many times on really hot days. I even laughed when our current vice president claimed to be a hillbilly simply because he visited his grandmother who lived in similar conditions in the summer. I suppose that because of my grandparents and those adventures on their farm I might be a bit of a hillbilly as well. I certainly had my feet in a very different world each summer when I left the city of Houston and traveled to Caddo Gap, Aransas where the people seemed to be from a century other than my own. In many ways those ties widened my vision of the world and taught me to appreciate all people even when they felt a bit strange.

That lady had a kind of grace and stature in spite of her down-home ways. The people who knew her seemed to understand how important she was to their community. I’d love to be able to go back to tell her how much I enjoyed that visit. I suppose she is long gone by now and maybe enjoying sitting under a heavenly tree talking to the angels.

Way back in the middle of my career as an educator I was working at a Catholic school teaching math to sixth, seventh and eighth graders. It was an enjoyable time when I felt that I was giving back the kind of education that I enjoyed when I was a young girl. The school had been losing students and had begun to feel rundown but a new principal had turned things around. In fact, she had reached out to recruit me at a time when I was rather content with my job in a public school. 

When I told her that I was not in the market for a change in my work she asked me to just come by for a discussion in which she would explain the kind of dynamic that she was attempting to build in the school. So without any thought that I would change my mind I went to see her as a kind of courtesy. It had been a Catholic school that provided me with my first job after graduation when nobody was hiring. I wanted to at the very least give the principal a moment of my time.

The principal was a tiny woman bursting with energy and enthusiasm about her role. By the end of her pitch I had decided that I really wanted to work for her and so I reluctantly turned in my resignation at the school where I had been contentedly teaching for three years. Happily from day one I knew that I had made the right choice. The atmosphere of the place was in keeping with my own philosophies about how to educate young men and women. 

The school had certain traditions that I also found to be enticing. One was a yearly International Festival, a gala created and presented by the teachers and students. The idea was that each teacher would draw the name of a country from a box and then create a learning experience for anyone who came for the event. 

I was quite excited about the prospect of teaching my homeroom students about a place in the world that may not have been particularly familiar to any of us. I knew that we would have to create a booth with artifacts and information, plan a food festival in the classroom and produce some kind of entertainment that would embody the spirit of whatever country’s name was written on the folded piece of paper that I pulled form the box. 

I suppose that I was initially a bit disappointed when I excitedly looked a the name of the country that would be the focus of my students. On the piece of paper was the single word “Canada.” Somehow it did not feel particularly exotic or exciting but I knew that I had to help my students come up with ideas about how to proceed. In the end it would become one of the most enriching experiences of my life.

Almost immediately a student stepped up and told me that his mother was friends with a woman from Canada who had an extensive collection of Canadian artifacts. After a quick phone call the woman immediately agreed to loan us her treasures for our booth. A trip to her home revealed a trove of items that seemed to have come from a museum. These were unique and valuable treasures that the woman eagerly loaned to me and my students along with detailed explanations about what they all were and how they related to Canadian history and culture. She seemed to be delighted to share her collection with the students who also felt as excited as I did when they realized what we would have to show as we educated the rest of the school about Canada.

Next we met as a class to decide what kind of food to present in our classroom restaurant. Several of the students had already done some research and insisted that having a tea time with Canadian tea and biscuits would be the most appropriate way to go. Of course maple syrup had to be somehow featured as well. 

For the entertainment the students came up with an hilarious skit about a Canadian Mountie who saved a damsel in distress from a terrible villain. We were set to go and only needed to shore up our knowledge of Canada and practice the skit. 

On the day of the event everyone was ready and every aspect of our efforts was a hit. The crowds around our booth were amazing as students and their families and friends got a close up look at wood carvings, brilliantly colored blankets, native artistry, and stunning artwork. There was a long waiting line for the tea time as my students dressed in finery poured tea into delicate china cups and served maple and lemon cookies on silver trays. In the grand finale of entertainment the skit received a standing ovation. At the end of the day my homeroom was presented with first place prize for their efforts. 

We were all over the moon but I reminded the students that without the artifacts and continued guidance of the sweet woman from Canada it is doubtful that our offerings would have been so unique. We all understood that she had to share in our glory and so every one of my students wrote a heartfelt letter of appreciation to her which I delivered when I returned her treasures. 

I suppose that since that time I have felt a special connection with Canada. I have gone to visit there many times and found the people to be more inviting than anywhere else I have been. In fact they seem to go out of their way to make me feel welcome. 

With the new trade wars and insults that our president has initiated against Canada I have felt a bit of shame. I know the people there to be our friends and neighbors. They are also generous and somehow turning on them in this way has felt so wrong. I hope that this insult will soon be rectified. In the meantime I have attempted to show my support for Canada by purchasing goods from there. It is a small effort but one with a message however mute it may seem to be. 

Canada is a really good neighbor. I know this to be so true. It is time we offer an apology and attempt to regain the trust and kinship that has been there for so long. At the same time that great lake that bleeds into both Canada and the United States will always be Lake Ontario for me. Being silly and insulting to Canada simply cannot stand. The very idea of it is wrong.

I taught fourth graders in the early years of my career. I often brought books from my home that provided extra information for topics that we were studying. I left them on a table and encouraged my students to feel free to borrow them or simply scroll through them when they had the time. Many of those books disappeared forever but that never bothered me the way it probably should have. I realized early on in that school that many of my students had little or no print material in their homes. I rationalized that if a student felt compelled to take a book forever I was providing a bit of the joy that reading had always been for me. I said nothing and often just replaced whatever had gone missing. 

Teaching disadvantaged children was enlightening for me. My family wasn’t exactly rolling in money after my father died but we still had all of the books that he had purchased before he was gone. They were proudly on view in bookshelves in our hallway and my brothers and I often read and reread them. My mother subscribed to one of the local newspapers and took us regularly to the library. Books were a central part of our lives from the time we were born. I witnessed both of my parents reading on a regular basis and so I just assumed that every family was like mine. Realizing that the majority of my students in that school had little or no access to reading material at home was distressing to me so I kept bringing volumes that might pique their interest without worrying about whether or not I got those items back. 

I watch the young mothers who are in my circle reading to their children on a daily basis. I see them taking their little ones to the library and putting them in early learning situations that provide them with advanced levels of learning from the start of their lives. It saddens me to know that many other children who live in economically deprived situations do not enjoy the luxury of books and educational experiences. Such children are often lucky just to have enough food for the duration between paychecks. Libraries are often too far away from where they live to make it convenient for them to visit regularly and so they exist in a kind of literary desert.

Most of the teachers that I know reach out to friends and family to purchase class sets of books for students to use. They bring in magazines and newspapers for which they have subscriptions. They do their best to provide their youngsters with opportunities to read. Some schools even have wonderful libraries and book fairs but the modern day trend has been to economize by eliminating librarians and reducing funding for free standing libraries. Emphasis in reading too often focuses only on learning certain skills rather than providing the wonders of reading self selected titles. Students begin to associate reading with a kind of drudgery rather than a beautiful journey into the world through words and illustrations. 

I have witnessed some masterful Reading and English teachers over the years. These men and women know how to bring the written word alive. They relate books with the human experience. They magically transform students from reluctant readers into young people who treasure books as much as a big screen television. Literacy becomes a joy rather than a task that is timed and judged by choosing multiple choice answers. 

Somehow with concern over test scores we all too often create a student’s association with reading as something onerous rather than wonderful. We force students to quickly read a few paragraphs and then answer silly questions that take the joy from learninshg. In some schools kids are now taught with scripts and timers that turn reading into a drill. For those children who have no print material in their homes such methods create a lifelong dread of reading. 

When my father and mother read to me the message from them was very clear. Because they loved me they wanted me to be able to know the joys of the written word. I associated reading with fun and laughter and most of all with comfort and security. I wanted desperately to learn how to make those letters strung together on a page make sense in my own mind. I wanted to read so that I might explore the world on my own. The result is that I have books tucked away and on view all over my home. They cover virtually every kind of genre and are in truth my most precious possessions. When hurricane Harvey was threatening our homes with flooding I moved my books to higher ground lest they be damaged if the water came in through my walls. I did that because I had learned the value of reading from my infancy into the present moment. 

We too often quibble and grumble about reluctant readers but when it is time to reallocate funds we take away the libraries and shut down the newspapers. We turn reading into a kind of algorithm of rules and questions to determine comprehension. We set timers and ignore the reality that many of our students have little or no access to books. Then we complain that literacy is falling and we point fingers at the teachers being pushed to teach from scripts while the librarians are ushered out the door. 

Creating avid readers begins when we are young. All it takes is the loving presence of someone who shows they care by making reading fun. We need only change the emphasis of instructions from test scores to the joy that reading brings into life. It can and should be the focus of education with opportunities for all.