Trip to Bountiful

Each day that I head to school I feel like I'm going to a land of plenty, a place of abundant richness, curiosity, characters, subplots, and home-grown tomatoes. The playground garden alone supplies me with an hour's worth of research questions each evening. What was that spider? That moth?

This morning my drive to bountiful took forty-five minutes, even though it's only five miles. Rain poured down and drivers crept along bumper-to-bumper on 75. Plenty of time to watch dark clouds, and to remember Geraldine Page in the Oscar-winning 1985 movie, The Trip to Bountiful, written by Horton Foote. What a performance to reward any viewer with patience and attention! What a film to put guys to sleep for lack of explosions and car crashes! At the end of the videotape I was sobbing, and my spouse was snoring.

Working with preschoolers can't be confused with a life of ease, but it's never dull. The phrase "land of plenty" calls up Cockaigne, the fictional utopia, best known by the Bruegel painting of sated villagers napping on the ground "in a lazy, luscious land". I'm happy when my students eat enough of their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to settle quickly into a happy nap.




© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder