My Own Curtain of Green

Eudora Welty, the great Mississippi writer, published her first book of stories under the title A Curtain of Green. With no slight to her artistry, I celebrate today my own curtain of green: the view through my classroom windows if I look slightly upwards

at the trees and their generous canopies.

Like many classroom buildings, mine is strictly utilitarian. Despite a spruce-up somewhere around the false millennium and despite the addition of an oversized facade, complete with oversized clock, a year or so ago, the building is a brick tunnel with insufficient and inefficient bathrooms, gray walls, dropped fluorescent lighting, and false ceilings.

My room, like the others, is, if I'm being generous, unattractive.

But my view is beautiful.

The leaves put on a show three seasons of the year, and the trunks and branches provide another in winter. Should I feel the need for a glimpse of something natural and flourishing and living, I simply raise my eyes.