Emily Brisse

Hello everyone, hello! Spring has finally and fully arrived in Minnesota, and we are all a bit crazy over it. Fling open those windows! Let it all grow! May everything just multiply.  The grass is so green and so high lawn mowers break down from the abundance. I usually say autumn is my favorite time of year, but this season? This parentheses in my life when my little boy is experiencing THE WORLD up close for the first time? There is magic in the air, people, and living a wild and precious life seems quite possible. Hallelujah. Although these past three months have been full of many things, both unsettling and celebratory, the biggest change has been my resignation from my current school district and my acceptance of a new teaching position in Minneapolis. I am thrilled about joining my new school, meeting a new set of smart and inspiring colleagues, and learning with a new crop of young ones, but it is a bittersweet move. I have been at my current school for the past decade; it wa

The baby is sleeping. Ahh--you see what I did there? That little untruth? Because he is not a baby, Miss Emily B. Remember all the ways that he is now a boy: Pointed finger, wearer of shoes, hall-runner, door-slammer, hahahahahahaha laugher, tantrum-thrower, always-hungry-carrot-monster, the "balls," the "birds," the "dars" (cars), the on-the-lips-kisses, the too-long hair, the long and lingering and serious gazes, the mischief-twinkling-father's-son stares, the charging-full-speed-into-mama's-arms-and-tipping-us-both-over-from-the-force kind of hugs, the lengthening of  legs, the sculpting of shoulders. Which is to say, time is passing. All week here it has rained and rained, sheets of it so thick that puddles widened into ponds that ducks sat in, soaking. We watched it. Heard it against the windows at night. Heard thunder, too. Felt the winter recede with the rest of the snow into the rivers, which are now over the banks, gobbling up mud and