When I took on the story of Ötzi the Iceman, I knew I couldn't assume I knew men. After 31 years of marriage, I cannot claim privileged access into the mysteries known as my husband's thinking. He still surprises me. Ötzi was nothing like me. He lived over 5000 years ago. He climbed mountains for a commute. He probably liked the cold. He was nothing like me. To be a believable character, I needed to fight to find a way past a woman's perspective. At first, I tried writing how I imagined primitive people spoke - honestly it sounded like Yoda. That didn't work. I tried a Hemingway strategy of writing about things that are crass and common, but my friend reminded me that it's okay if he pees in a bush, but have a purpose for doing so. Stepping into the shoes of this ancient man needed more than grunts and bodily functions. I needed to find a way to listen. What I knew I could not do was pretend Ötzi was me. I could not just try to write him as a Byronic hero. I could not treat him as an "other" fostered by the whole Men are from Mars ideology. In order to write his story the way I desired, I needed to offer him the gift of respect. I needed to see the human in him. The author Khaled Hosseini gave me the perspective I needed. His novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is my favorite of all his works. The story of two Afghani women caught in decades of an abusive culture grabbed my heart. I cried when I was supposed to. I got angry at the injustice against them precisely as I would if I were hearing their story from a woman. I felt the strength of Mariam's sacrifice as powerful as any splendid sunrise. Yet this story was told by a man. A Thousand Splendid Suns was part of my curriculum for years. I saw all kinds of students wrestle with the emotional journey Hosseini took the reader on. My teenage girls cried. My teenage guys secretly told me on the side that they had cried. The impact of this novel went to the heart. Writing that makes the reader feel on a deep level was captured in those pages. Each time I reread the two women's struggle, I found something new and I always returned to the question, "How did a man write this?" During an interview, Hosseini revealed his secret. He had interviewed over 250 Afghani women. He heard their sorrows and their unbelievable tales of suffering. His heart broke for the beleaguered souls daring to share their experiences. While listening, he began to see a common strength and beauty. He began to notice the power of not just being a woman and overcoming, but of being alive and in community. He found the human saga that every writer looks to as their Milky Way. The solution was to treat his two main characters, Mariam and Laila, as people and not as women. By looking at the heart of emotions and hopes and disappointments and longing, he found his path to the core of who the women are that he represented. When I wrote Ötzi's story, I thought of him as a human being with feelings and hopes that had to navigate the obstacles of plot points. I looked to what he might have experienced when feeling shame or guilt. I let the human character come and tell me how to write his story. When I needed to ensure an action that I described would be a guy thing to do, I asked my husband. He ultimately is my Gaspare. I valued his perspective when I said, "So I've got this situation and I don't know how to get out of it. What do you think?" Now that Ötzi's story has been told, I'd really like to write something from a woman's point of view. What I now understand, however, is no matter who's point of view I use, I need to treat them with the respect and dignity of being a human being with a story that somehow transcends boundaries of time, culture, and gender. I need to let my characters tell me who they are. The hardest part will always be to try and write it all down and keep up.

A point of discussion with my editor centered around my description of the shades of shadows. Many scenes in Shroud of Ice are couched under the light of the moon. My family often walked out into the moonlight whether to a bonfire or to identify the stars, we looked to the heavens for the strength of light pushing through the overwhelming darkness. That's where I discovered shadows have colors. It's not a question of black or white. The night's light pulses with depth of perception. The effect of a super moon etched the following lines: "The full bonemeal moon spread luminously through the vast richness of colors found in the shadows. The darkness tingled. I stood alone, empty, and isolated from the marrow of life around me. Gazing again at the stars pulled questions echoing from the corners of my mind. Who else might be seeing the Raven and maybe thinking of me?" ( Shroud of Ice 4) A longing to be remembered, a deep calling to be seen, to feel loved pulls Gaspare to return home. He seeks forgiveness to define the shape of his existence within the darkness surrounding him. Longing sources through the shadows. What feels like loneliness is more like palpable shades within the shadows of Gaspare's life. The darkness cannot hold itself in the intense light of a super moon. Instead a silver sheen casts back what he thought was unseeable and reveals a beauty of silent grace among the conversations of shadows. It's in this darkness that he listens to the courage growing inside. What does he hear? The desire of freedom calling him to more. Last night, this super moon, the Beaver Moon as called by ancient people, glowed warmth in an early November night. My camera cannot capture the silver covering like a sheer snow laying on the ground. Only my eyes can see the moon's light creating depth of beauty. Unlike Gaspare, I did not sit alone. My husband and I walked out into the night, found a bench and sat together under the grace of this intense light. For a reason I have yet to understand, the vastness of a sky set against a super moon gives me more hope than the brightest, sunniest day. Maybe because I see and know I can simply be. Maybe the sense of graceful beauty secures in me a sense of strength in immense darkness. I do not look to the sun and wonder who else might be thinking of me. I look to the night sky and see the star Vega and think of my daughter 582 miles away and send a prayer to her. It is in the darkness that I look to the source of light and find grace.

Over 500 versions of the Cinderella fairytale have been found. Popelka is the Czech version of this story. Popelka is a pretty maiden surrounded by greedy stepsisters. She works her father's farm and doesn't desire more than the simple things in life. Her fairy godmother is an owl and she grants her three hazelnuts. In the three nuts, Popelka found three dresses - one to go to the ball, one to challenge the prince in a hunting match, and the last was a wedding dress. She found everything she needed to change her life. Last year, I harvested my first four little hazelnuts. This year my bushes produced about a dozen. None of the nuts contain any wishes, but they still bring satisfaction and anticipation. To open a hazelnut from the bush requires slowing down, peeling off the leaves, and removing the nut's shell for the meat inside. It's a process. Fall is my favorite season. The colors attract me. The cooling air calls me as I reach for a sweater. It's the clove of the seasons. It's a different kind of harvest that I am trying not to miss. I'm trying to slow down. Lately, fall has arrived dressed in incredibly busy times. The past few years, I allowed the wants and needs of work and commitments to suffocate my enjoyment of the changes around me. This year seemed no different. I heard a great expression that I am going to cultivate this autumn. "Want what you have and need what you want." I have a dozen hazelnuts. I am more than happy with my little harvest. I cannot really bake anything with them. I cannot satiate my hunger with so few. But I can want exactly the hazelnuts that I have and not a single one more. If more than the weather and amount of light is going to change, I need to nurture the will to want just what I have. This lesson of nature contains my three wishes and so many more.

If you said I held an acorn, you wouldn't be wrong, but you wouldn't be completely right. Some might say this is a shell holding the potential of a mighty oak tree. Some might say it is a nut, some might look at it and see a craft idea. Some might see a source of protein - the deer, squirrels, and wild hogs still eat what the Native Americans used to grind for flour. Some farmers might look at the abundance and together with other natural signs predict a heavy snow for the upcoming winter. To the scientist, it is classified as the seed belonging to the genus Quercus . To say it's just an acorn is to miss the entire point. If someone limited what I hold to one thing that they understood, then they will be secluded to a world of singular perspective. Truth like any diamond of value is found in the multifaceted sides that require us to work together to build understanding. In the classroom, during Socratic seminars, I never let a student stop at the answer, "It's relative to a person's perspective." This mode of thinking stems back to Modernism from the 1920s. The philosophical approach of each person holding the truth as they see it places us squarely in the center of I for individual or isolation. This is not the characteristic of a scholar seeking excellence. This is the empty statement of one who doesn't wish to be challenged or to put effort into listening. When all my children are home and we gather around the dinner table, we eventually start the topic of, "Remember when...." Invariably someone will say that is not how they remember whatever the event was. Each family member, though present at the same event, experienced a unique moment that shaped their perspective. The truth of what happened exists, but not in just one person's memory of the moment. As a family we need to listen to each other and try to understand where the other perspective sprouted from. Did it come from a moment of rejection or humiliation? Did the perspective come from a feeling of humor or being rewarded? The pursuit of what really happened should grow from a desire to love and know our family members better. What do I hold in my hand? I hold a moment after leaving the Farmers Market on a sunny Saturday. I had just met two former students - one recent and one from years ago, gotten a hug from a friend, met another coworker, and enjoyed trying to find peaches. The sun's dappled light danced through the leaves, which were still green. It was early September. When I looked down and spied the tiniest cap, thoughts of a fairy swelled my heart to believe I could still be a child again just for a moment. Compelled, I stopped to pick it up, admire the potential, and kept it safe like a secret promise between me and Autumn. I needed to be sure I didn't lose whatever it was that I held.

One of the themes of Shroud of Ice spins around the question are we enough. Behind every life changing decision lurks these words of doubt. We either answer with action or inaction. Here is a scene from Chapter 2 of Shroud of Ice . Gaspare is unable to find his courage to be more than his past defined for him. He is bound within the slavery not just of the copper mines, but within the walls of his own mind. The scene takes place under a heavy moon by the lake with his friend Haliam. The silence of the lake pulled our gaze out across the waters to the far edge. The wave’s lapping sounds blended with the frogs’ mating calls. Fear buzzed behind my eardrums. “Don’t you want to go home?” Haliam asked. Displaced anger threw down my reply. “Why? What’s there? There’s nothing left for me. Do you understand? Nothing . . . nuk  is what you say, right?  Nuk .” My sharp reply tasted like acid. No one missed me because no one had come. When my legs had felt like breaking on the mountain’s rocks, the only thing to pick me up had been the pull of the rope tied to another slave. No one came to help me. Why should I want to go home? They were better off. The old village cries of “cursed one” from my memory joined the fear buzzing—death had marked me. The flutter of a bat’s wings scuttled overhead. Smacking the mosquitos one last time, I shifted to leave. Haliam stopped me. “An old tale from my village tells of a great man who died and stood before the greatest god. The man thought his greatness enough to have earned passage to the god’s presence. The deity looked him over and commanded the dead man to show him his wounds. There were no scars, of course, because he hadn’t done anything great. The god sent him back till he found something worth fighting for.” Haliam let his words linger. A frog sang louder; puffing his chest, he repeated his call, desperate for a mate in the dark. “Where is that boy from the well who fell trying to give me food all those springs ago?” he asked. “That boy would want more than this place.” Scoffing, I turned away from him and the moon. My head shook. “That boy fell off a cliff and died,” I said. “I don’t believe that. I won’t. Only one with a heart of courage would have pushed through the crowd to help me. That courage cannot be gone. The heart of the eagle lies inside you, Gaspare,” Haliam said, making a fist and pounding his chest. “I failed. You never got my food,” I said. Haliam quickly reached for my shoulder. With the hoarsest whisper, he said, “I feasted on more than food. All those people, all that hostility and anger that surrounded me, were defeated each time I remembered your courage. I made the trek across mountains here because your kindness reminded me good still existed.” Haliam looked at me, willing that boy from the past at my village’s well to stand in my place.

We celebrate Thankful Thursday at my new school. We sit family style around a large table, a parent brings in food to share, and we enjoy being together. In a moment of silence as we begin to learn to be together and trust each other, someone will be prompted to share what they are thankful for. Something I am noticing in this act of saying thank you is the words are not natural. It must be taught. As a mother, I spent a lot of time focusing on say please and thank you. As my children grew, I prompted them to write thank you notes. Yet I am not sure this is enough to teach a heart to be thankful. Remembering to say thank you is good. Saying thank you communicates a seen appreciation of another. The simple gesture of noticing deepens a relationship in appreciation. Taking time to notice enhances our understanding of the goodness surrounding our decisions and trials of the day. "Take time to smell the roses" pushes this notion of awareness into the realm of action rather than simply being receptive to noticing. This depth of heart calls me to ponder if slowing down isn't the key to a grateful and grace filled heart; if slowing our moments isn't critical for the growth of enjoyment in our relationships. C.S. Lewis wrote, "The more often a man feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." When I allow the stresses of my day to press down on me, I feel exhausted mentally, but there's more. The exhaustion seeps inside to my core, creating a sense of entrapment. A numbness comes from not seeing a break in the near future. It's in those times that I am retraining myself to notice tiny beauty around me. The sound of the neighbor child as she runs down her yard to greet me. She's the beauty of innocence and gladness. The bee that fell asleep in my rose. It's exhaustion reminds me of those still waters and green pastures that I will be led to by my Shepherd. The solitary cow next door grazing in a different direction from the rest of the herd, shows the strength in nature to not always do what is expected. Strength is beautiful and often awe-inspiring. When I do take the time to recognize and appreciate the little beauties in my path, I see gifts of love from the Keeper of my heart. Balance begins to enter into my chaos. Have I perfected this? Not even close. The world around is very loud, very angry, very demanding. But I find myself looking more for the gentle touch of love from my Father in heaven. The result is a feeling of being alive deep inside with a warm light. This little light of mine is something I am very thankful for.

This catch phrase for Shroud of Ice  lingers with me. What if the past isn't dead? What if it is just waiting to be remembered? So much surrounding Ötzi is filled with silent voices waiting for us to hear. He has taught us much about what we have forgotten. He moved the timeline back 1000 years from where we believed the Copper Era began. But I've said this before. What is it about Ötzi that calls to me? This picture is a frozen frame of the actual removal of Ötzi's mummy from the glacier back in 1991. I am intrigued by the way it appears the past is holding hands with the present. That is what I felt while pursuing this journey of telling his story. My original goal was to try writing a murder mystery. I figured with how old he was, no one really could tell me I was wrong. His is the oldest cold case to date. If we examine the facts, we know he had five different hemoglobin on his coat. That could have come from a battle, but it could also reveal that he was a messy eater. We know the path of his last 30 hours alive thanks to the mosses found in and on his body, but we cannot know why he chose to go the harder path over the mountain ridge. We know he suffered a debilitating injury to his right hand about four days before his murder. What appears to be a defensive wound from blocking the hit of a weapon broke to the bone in two different places. There was a lot of force in that hit. We know that he was out of resources with his weapons. He had unfinished arrows, an unfinished bow, three arrowheads on three broken or cut arrow shafts and a chipped knife meant he didn't have a way to defend himself except with the copper axe. But there is no way to know who hit him and who wanted him dead. One fact we do know is his body lies in repose on display for viewers to gaze at. He has been kept frozen to mimic the glacier that ensconced his last breath. He has been x-rayed and poked and sampled revealing amazing finds of his last supper, his approximate age of about 46, the fact that he might have been lactose intolerant, and had worms. Lyme's disease also seems to be an ailment he had together with a bad heart that would have collapsed on him if an arrow had taken him when it did. We know so many facts except his name or his story. Ötzi is not his name. It is derived from the Ötzal mountain range that he was found on. My desire was to restore dignity to this man. I gave him a name. I called him Gaspare. It is based on the semi-precious gemstone jasper that has been found in ancient priest robes. One theory is that Ötzi was a holy man of his village based on his axe and medicinal treatments he had with him. I based his life on another holy man that I know named Joseph from the Old Testament. Joseph was a dreamer of visions. His brothers hated him enough to try and kill him. Ötzi's murder is believed to have been a crime of passion, so I made this connection. I also gave him the gift of language, or one who can quickly pick up another language, a polyglot of sorts. Ötzi's language is extinct. There are some ideas of what it would have sounded like. What we do know because of him is that the trade routes were open. The copper from his axe came from over 350 miles to the west and amber found in the Baltic Sea region was uncovered at an archeological dig in his area. No flint rocks were naturally from his region either, so with trade came the need to communicate. Ötzi came a bit before the Indo-European language formalized. The gift of words is something I wanted this silent man to have. Most importantly though, I wanted him to have a story that reflects who we are as people. The more we learn of his time period, the more we realize he was much more advanced than we believed. An interactive display of the arrow embedded in Otzi's mummy. The real mystery is not in how he died, but how he lived. The conflicts of love and hate, dreams and sorrow are as timeless as humanity. We look to the stars and question or seek guidance. We pick ourselves up and try again. We desire justice, but crave mercy. People are people. A review of Shroud of Ice calls the story haunting. Yes, his story haunted my imagination.   As I descended his mountain, I felt the ending inside of me. I could see my solution as a whisper from beyond.  It  is my prayer that after the telling of his tale, he may truly rest in peace knowing someone listened. I cannot wait for you to read Shroud of Ice!

My son just brought a puppy home. Okay but what kept me from writing even before the puppy? Well, I have a lot to do, I’m not feeling it, the muses have left my side. I have no shortage of ideas for stories. I'm fascinated with the great tea race to India because of the tall masted ships. I ponder the idea of Vikings coming to Newfoundland and have the first 10 pages drafted. I think the women's suffrage movement in Virginia is filled with daring. My lack of working at my laptop has nothing to do with no idea what to write. So why do I avoid what brings me joy and makes me feel a rush of living purposefully? Today my writing group meets, so right on time yesterday I began contemplating excuses to ask for an extension. The puppy is a solid reason. I put it in the text as an option, hit send, and waited. Sure enough the first response came back with, “I’m fine either way.” I received the opening to postpone that I desired. But was not writing what I truly wanted? What is it about writing that I avoid? I dreamed of becoming an author. My first novel took 12 years to write. Most of that time was spent convincing myself I could and would actually write a book. The possibility existed that I wasn’t good enough for my dream. It sounds more significant to say I’m writing a book than to believe my story needed me. I just needed to show up, to believe I had the ability to bring the story to life, yet a decade worth of excuses got in the way. If I truly believe something, then I act without thinking. I don’t inspect a chair before sitting. I believe the chair will hold me and I act accordingly. So why can’t I believe in my writing? With three novels under my belt, I’m still making excuses to my writing group and myself. I’m not sure I’ve pondered the extent of my problem, but when I consider my excuses, they stem from distractions and no time. Kronos, the father of the Titans, devoured his children. Kronos, as time deified, was eating away through life’s limits of death. In this modern setting, time not only devours us, it is filled with so much noise we can’t remember what’s important to us let alone begin to imagine our dreams as a reality. With each day filled with the noise of burgeoning calendars and text messages of "I'm running a little late," our dreams die, sacrificed to time’s insidious intent to distract us from what we deeply desire. A story sitting inside is a little song. If I am going to write, I must carve out time to quiet my mind and schedule long enough to hear the melody. The characters exist inside my being waiting, longing to walk among the living. That is an honorable and noble act - to sacrifice a corner of my time to breathe in quiet and exhale through the written word. This is precisely why my writing group is meeting tonight at my house to accommodate the puppy. I don’t have anything new to share yet, but I’ve made a promise to get one page written, just one. That will be enough until the next time our writers group shows up on my calendar and the excuses begin again.

“An Author to her Book” is a poem by Anne Bradstreet that I used to enjoy teaching. She addresses her book as her child personifying the motherly relationship with the words and images we place on the page. Throughout the poem, Bradstreet relays the internal struggle of not being good enough to dress her child for going out into the world and inevitably into the hands of critics. With my latest novel sitting beside me, I hear the nagging little voices telling me I’m not good enough. I feel the tug to apologize for asking people to read my story, but I also have an excited quiver, making me feel alive. This is it. Ready or not, Shroud of Ice releases this Nov 25. This little guy is all set to tell the final chapters of the oldest cold case - Otzi the Iceman murdered over 5000 years ago. It’s a tale of the betrayal by those we love, a fight for survival as we make our way home, the power of forgiveness especially of ourselves, and the courage to believe we were meant for more. But still, in the quiet of the morning with his brand new cover and bound pages I can’t help but ask him if he’s going to be alright out there. The world is a scary place. He simply says, “It's going to be okay. I’ve got this, Mom.”

Standing on the edge of my lavender garden feels like staring into the abyss of why did I try? I enjoyed a respectable harvest this spring and felt encouraged that less plants perished from the winter. Weeks of spring melted into torrential rains of summer. Our drought last year was over. We had an extraordinary +5” of rain and lavender doesn’t like wet feet.  The first indicator came when two rows of plush, healthy plants turned to brown sticks in a week, then a few more plants gave up. What once promised to give me a bounty of relaxation and a retirement income now failed in front of me. Grief’s denial works on my instinct to go into ostrich mode, to take the child's approach of if I can't see you, then you don't exist. But failure waited for me to notice. Unless I’m saving an astronaut from sling shotting past the moon, failure is definitely an option.  As a society, we put a negative stigma on failure. The fear that comes with this “f” word is enough to cripple any perfectionist from even starting. Many talented students have chosen to wear the embarrassment of not completing the task because they were afraid they couldn't do it perfectly. I've seen that many times. In class, we talked about the role of failure as a natural and healthy process to get us to a stronger and happier place in life. The idea was to take the sting away. The reality still hurts and exists in the pain of saying I didn't win this one. Trying to apply what I teach, I've pondered how to navigate this arena. I still don't look at my lavender, but I'm accepting that there's a life lesson in here somewhere. Three steps that I’m learning from this brink are simple and in my control. Understand what part I played in the failing. I do not have any control over the weather, but I did have control over how well I prepped the ground before planting. No amount of heart can overcome a poor foundation. That’s on me. I discovered this when analyzing why one of my gardens flourished and this did not. Decide how much repair is worth it and make a plan to correct mistakes. I will not just throw a thousand dollars of plants at this problem next spring. I need to address the soil first and work the ground to be stronger, then get a few of the varieties of lavender that I enjoyed. I think maybe twelve will be good.  Ask for help and listen. This is the hardest part of falling down, but we belong together and are connected with each other. My daughter reminds me to take a step back, reevaluate and see what comes into focus. She's right, time is a tool, not an enemy. By asking for help, I am redefining my understanding of control. Failure is all about losing an unhealthy sense of control, the control that is attached to pride. Taking responsibility for what I can influence is a healthy sense of control. Because I’ve stood on that brink and wiggled my toes over the edge, I am discovering the grit inside waiting to grow. I'm stronger than I thought. With a little self-reflection and problem solving, I can work within this failure, looking forward to what my next challenge will be.

“There’s nothing like the feeling of bringing in a herd” is a City Slicker movie quote that I like. Three best friends, messed up in a midlife crisis, go to a dude ranch, searching for meaning. Our Lavender Ink Society didn't have a midlife crisis, we just had a crisis. One of our founding members passed away suddenly. We felt entrusted, as knights of honor, to finish her story, a love story about her parents. Wrangling cows from the movie became synonymous with the words that didn’t want to go where we needed them to be. After one year of not knowing how, the rodeo of plot sequence sits roped in front of us and Despite It All is ready for an agent. Not that I’m a weekend cowboy, but as a writer writing the last sentence, I felt those final, unused words "the end" and I’ve got to say there’s nothing quite like it. What started as a conversation on my deck became a labor of love. “Sharon, how did you do it? How did you get published?” My friend, Lisa, needed to know. She needed my help. She burned with the desire to write her parents’ love story - he had been a Jew and she the daughter of a Nazi - true story. Lisa had a passion to capture what she had witnessed as a powerful tale of love's blind ability to overcome obstacles.   We founded our writers group of four and poked our way around words and each other. She had gotten about twenty thousand words on the page, yet with Lisa gone her parents’ story was unfinished. Grief and love for our beautiful friend and her dream compelled us to pledge our fidelity, our singular loyalty to the task of finishing her book. Three women of different writing styles would attempt to overlay voices with Lisa's original writer’s voice. The task was daunting.  We met with Lisa's mother over tea to understand the facts remembered. We zoomed with her daughters or met at our favorite pub, O'Brien's. With the writing not being our own, we took risks and tried a variety of approaches to craft this love story, a story of her parents and of our own hearts grasping to stay true to our friend’s vision. Many times we wanted to quit. Life got full and we didn't know where to go in the story. Lisa, however, is special. Her passion compelled us to listen to the characters. The first anniversary of her death passed in July. We had his story. We had her story, but we still didn't have their story. We didn't have a complete novel to gift her family. Motivation, the mysterious mistress of writers, showed up. The words weren’t just waiting for us to notice anymore. They persuaded us to sit down and write. As the last two chapters came into view, We felt the flow of the words harnessed as a team pulling to the last sentence. "The end" happened even though we don't say that anymore, and we felt amazing! We did the nigh impossible. Today we met with Lisa's family for the handoff. Our promise stood fulfilled. We had finished just in time. Often when we do not think we can or know how we will complete a challenge, we just need to hold on and push through. That decision of I can't is when an amazing opportunity waits just on the other side. The only thing we can't do is say, "I can't." We just cannot give up. At long last, our friend has her story, her mother knows her husband's love lives on, and our writers group has a feeling there’s nothing quite like.

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William Arthur Ward Ms. Joan Fisher had flaming red hair and a machine gun laugh that ricocheted through the halls. I tried to slip behind her to claim a seat the first day of class when she stepped back on my foot with her stiletto. She asked my name and said she would never forget me and then laughed her impressive laugh. I am the one who never forgot her. She taught much more than American literature. She taught authenticity, what it meant to be real and to come broken to the pages of a story and find a piece of me there. She heard my voice and amplified the shy kid, who preferred to be hidden in the back of the room. She believed in me when I needed someone to. I built my 22 years in the classroom from her model of teaching. This year will be the first that I am not opening the door to my classroom. I step into a new role mentoring other teachers. With that task at hand, I need to reflect on the core values of what makes a teacher impactful. Yesterday at lunch, my friend asked what the difference was in my last year of teaching compared to other years. I told my students that we were going to finish this together. We began our last term striving for the same end goal - graduation from public school. This comradery created a bond I couldn't anticipate. Senior year can be difficult, especially after March and college acceptances start coming in. The last years of teaching can be difficult. To resist the temptation of relying on our laurels is a struggle. A dynamic classroom contains learners and teachers on both sides of the desk. I think that's one of the greatest lessons I will take from the classroom. Listen to others. Let others have the safe space to share their stories and burgeoning ideas. Only then will we graduate into a better sense of understanding and grace.