The Cart Lady

I haven't been blogging because I'm furiously trying to accumulate 200 pages of my manuscript so that I can spend the year revising. I thought I'd share a snippet of the beginning of a piece I'm writing about my second first day as a teacher - when the hurricane mess calmed a little bit and I was handed a shiny new class all my own. It's called Borrowed. Here is the intro...

It wasn’t until three weeks in that I became the cart lady, the traveling teacher, the education vendor. Just short of an actual bell or melody of ice cream truck tunes to lure children toward my vehicle of educational treats, my cart had the look of a concession stand at the circus or the food trolley on planes and trains and downtown plazas. Frank the Focused Flamingo, a hot pink Beanie Baby, sat with his legs dangling off the left edge of my cart. He was to sit on the desks of only the most attentive, engaged pupils as the ultimate reward. The Good Karma bucket, a recycled popcorn pail that I kept stashed with both used and unused raffle tickets and a purple bingo marker, took its post right beside the flamingo. The bucket was like Frank – a bright motivational tool that could win you prizes through good, kind deeds. For balance, a plastic three-tiered organizational system occupied the middle of the top shelf. And thirty sixth grade literature textbooks were stacked on the bottom two shelves – heavy and bulky to slow my sharp turns and keep me rolling at an appropriate pace down the hallways to my borrowed classroom...