First in Freedom

There are not many days I wish I were back teaching in the fourth grade, but today is one of those days. I would make sure we had a big, BIG celebration. For today, you see, is MecDec Day! I should call my fourth graders from the past to join me around the flagpole and revel in the joy of having Founding Fathers who cared about freedom. We could toast the concept as only a classroom of history-loving children should. I'd make sure every one of them had a noise maker of sorts. If it weren't illegal, I'd set off big fireworks.

Today is so important to the state and to the nation that it is even on our flag, the one that hung in the front of the room opposite Old Glory herself. 

Isn't it beautiful! Oops, I wanted to show the reason today is MecDec Day, and the image caught the wave at the wrong time. Yesterday morning, I took a picture of the flag at our town's museum. It was still wrapped in plastic when I spread it out on a table, but here it is, in its own kind of glory, wrinkles and all...our own America250 reason to celebrate today, two hundred and fifty years later.

Back when Charlotte was a Hornet's nest of stinging questions about what the British monarchy meant to the citizens of the colony of North Carolina, there was a group of men who gathered to take action against the unfairness of it all. They wrote what has been labeled the Mecklenburg Resolves after Mecklenburg County, where this major step against the crown took place. This was a full year before the more famous and more revered Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. In fact, David Fleming's recent book Who's Your Founding Father? about his "quest to uncover the first, true Declaration of Independence," dives deep into the story behind the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and the controversy surrounding it. If you think a book about history is a dry, boring read, think again. This book was a hoot, a page-turner hoot! Take a look at my copy in front of the state flags on my desktop screen. Didn't I stage it perfectly!

Our declaration was first (despite what naysayers have to say). Once upon a time, not so long ago, we even bragged about it on our car license tags. 

And you best believe that in all the years I taught fourth grade social studies, come every May 20th, we would study the flag and talk about how people can peacefully protest unfair rules. Best of all, you don't have to be a student in a classroom to celebrate. We have the freedom to do so. The Founding Fathers saw to that!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Poetry Workshop

Hip! Hip! Hooray for Foothills Writers! I love this group of motley authors! We are a strange mix that has come together with one goal in mind...become better writers. We were featured in the March issue of Our State magazine, that's how established we are. Now we are going to have a delightful event, a poetry reading under the gazebo...picnic shelter really, but gazebo sounds so much more poetic! 

We meet regularly on Wednesdays at the museum in Gamewell and share the good times of publishing and sympathize with the not-so-good times of rejections of someone's latest submission. After a meet-and-greet (and eat) time, we rattle our brains and warm up our typing fingers with a six-minute prompt. The topics we address come from out of the blue and have taken me into spaces I never would have imagined I would be. We share our compositions with each other, if we wish. Or not. Some are so personal that we don't want to hear our words spoken aloud.

After these preliminaries, the leader of the day presents a writing-related lesson. During the month of April, three of us per session taught about one form or another of poetry...in honor of Poetry Month. One person chose ballads. Another did open verse. One did a variation of haiku. Another did conversational poems and on a different day did Taurograms, where each word in the poem starts with the same letter, not an easy task if I say so myself. I signed up for three different dates to teach and looked through the list of varying poetry formats to find the styles that I wanted to share. I need structure as I write, so I looked for poetry that had a cadence and a rhyming scheme...like a cinquain. I had actually studied that in school somewhere along the way. Five lines. Varying rhymes - ABAAB; ABABB, any combination of words that rhyme. For my other class sessions, I wanted something eccentric, something so unusual it would make a fun time. Both of the ones I selected were from the Welsh tradition. Those poets really know how to complicate life in a most interesting way.

First I chose the Cyhydedd Fer poem structure. This is a poem made up of couplets, pairs of rhyming lines, which attracted me to them in the first place, but, and here's the kicker, each line must have eight syllables. Not so difficult, once I learned how to pronounce the name. We meet in a museum and are surrounded with mannequins displaying uniforms...military, sports, Scouts. I assigned everyone to imagine the person who once wore those uniforms and write a Cyhydedd Fer to tell a story. What we came up with!

On a different week, I taught another poem format I couldn't pronounce...will I ever learn!! This one was a clerihew, a more recent poem structure with a four-line AABB rhyme scheme, comical or whimiscal themed, and about a noted person. First we all wrote about the same person, Edgar Allen Poe. The fact that Edgar had so many variations was a testament to the wide range of brain philosophers in our Foothills Writer's group. Next I had everyone trace a six degree of separation from a famous person to themselves (think Kevin Bacon) and then write a clerihew about it. What fun!

Now we want to share the product of our labors with you. We invite you to celebrate with us this Wednesday afternoon, May 14, one o'clock at the Gamewell Walking Park. No telling what you will hear!

Catch of the Day,

Gretchen

PS There will be food!