Day 89

Frosty morning.  This was taken about ten days ago, and is a reminder that the sun did once shine and will shine again, (hopefully) for all my Massachusetts friends who are tired of being wet and damp and soggy!

School again today, so no running, just a quick walk up the hill with the black dog as the dawn struggled through the drenching rain which is still falling!  We have had two 50-year rain-storms in a matter of two weeks!  The earth is soft and squishy and water rushes everywhere, tumbling down rooves, hurtling out of gutters in spouts, streaking windows, surfing across windshields, crossing the road in torrents at times.  Numerous roads and even part of Route 24, a highway, have been closed!  I wonder about my birds, and all the 'critters', the raccoons, coyotes, and others, what do they do, they have no warm dry houses in which to shelter, poor things. 

Tim is away in San Jose, so I had to do his chores (waking the boys and feeding the cat and cleaning out the litterbox, and, on Tuesday, walking the dog), and feed the piggy, all before I left for school at about 6.40. Amazing how some days you can get everything done in an organised way, and other days things just fall apart!  (Today was an organised day, except for my last 6th grade class, who must all have drunk coffee with mountains of sugar at lunchtime!) 

I had to drive into Boston to pick up my student's artwork from the Boston Globe Scholastic Awards, and forgot Tim's GPS.  I am not a fan of driving in the city but I had a look at the map beforehand and thought I could do it.  Sheets of rain accompanied me and of course on exiting 93N into the city I was immediately lost in Chinatown!  But I didn't allow myself one jot of panic, just calmly drove down streets in what I thought was the general direction of my destination, the State Transportation Building, thinking, how hard can this be really?  Eventually I found a place to stop, calmly took out the mapbook, found my location, and then managed to arrive at the building in a couple of minutes!  I was very proud of myself.

I had memorised the return route but found that when I came out of the parking garage, I couldn't turn left into a one-way street, so again, kind of flew by the seat of my pants and recognised landmarks and streetnames, and places we have often walked, and now I know that I could drive there easily again, with no GPS or directions, the route has joined the Massachusetts map in my head, one of many maps.  This is a downfall of technology, a lot of it tends to 'dumb us down'.  I have been there twice before, following the GPS voice telling me what to do, just following the directions without any thought, blindly, like a mole.  I know that before GPS systems, taxi-drivers in London, for example, actually grew a whole piece of their brains, in the mid-posterior hippocampus, which is associated with navigation in birds and animals,  because of the enormous amount of information they needed to retain in the map in their heads.

So here are some of the maps in my head, a learning spanning fifty-five years, crossing continents and oceans, part of the map of my life.