Word: flowers
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Their heads are bowed at their desks like the flowers I have given them. This is an in-class writing assignment: write a page on what the flower smells like. It is an exercise in stream of consciousness for my students at Long Island University's Southampton College. The school is small and unadorned, spread out on a rise overlooking a bay; it is about to come in to flowers of its own in the reluctant spring thaw...
While they do their exercise, they become mine. Write what they look like: 15 young people in jeans, sweatshirts and sweaters, bodies hooked over a white sheet of paper, pursuing memories, dressing them up and watching to ascertain that their hands are following their instructions. The flower is laid aside on the desk, its work done. The students are off now like hounds. They follow the scent to funerals, weddings, proms. One girl will remember lying in the night grass under a blue moon with her little sister. Another will recall a last dance with a midshipman in Navy whites...
They hunker down. Still so much to say. They have long ago left the smell of the flower behind and are hurtling down streams of consciousness as if taking rapids. Their necks and shoulders are locked. Their hands are disembodied and skitter from left to right like the automatic returns on electric typewriters. Finally, they stop and wait, heads up in bloom...
...miles away. Noother relatives. No money for a private nurse. Besides, we thought, the staff was friendly, and we'd stop by every day for a couple hours and take her out for walks and snacks. She could still clip coupons from the newspaper and keep some small flower pots in her room. Then we'd bring her home in June and take it one day at a time...
...well rehearsed. In addition there were dancers from the top levels of the school who also fit in very well with the rest of the corps de ballet. This scene was one of the prettiest in the ballet, with the coloring of the costumes representing pink, peach, and yellow flower petals swirling across the stage. The girls carried garlands over their heads (a scene strikingly similar to one in Sleeping Beauty, a ballet Marius Petipa created 22 years after Le Corsaire...