Sukkot in Yosemite

Sometimes days pass and I hardly think about school, about teaching, about the place on Brotherhood Way that has been my home away from home (and sometimes even more of my home than that) the past six years. It's easy when my to-do list is long and living in Berkeley definitely helps but every now and then something catches my eye or my memory and I am schoolsick beyond measure. In moments like that I miss the classroom in which no one up until this year had taught but me, I miss pitching kickball at recess, I miss using the student whose official room job each week is "Special Delivery" to pass notes to other teachers who are my friends, I miss it all.

I missed school yesterday especially when, lying on the couch in semiconscious feverishness, I listened as Aubrie told me all the teachers who are going to Sukkot in Yosemite next week. Every few years our school packs it up right around now, the week after Yom Kippur, and heads up into the mountains to celebrate the wacky Jew holiday of Sukkot not in the desert of ancient Egypt but the wilderness of modern Yosemite. The first year I taught there was the first year we went and some families went, some families stayed behind in the city. This is now the third trip and there are seven hundred people who'll be there together. Seven hundred--is that even possible?! Some of my colleagues are leading hikes and some of them are leading art projects and some of them are leading Shabbat services and as for me I will be in Yosemite too, at camp, with a different community that I have chosen to become part of for now.

I can tell already that I will miss being with them terribly. I have been very schoolsick lately :(