On a sunny day in mid-July, I visited a lavender farm in Sequim, WA with my friend Judy from Northern California.  She was beginning to grow lavender herself, and as a merchant at her local farmers’ market, she was eager to add lavender products to her offerings.

At the small organic farm, we met Helen Mitchell, who was demonstrating the process of making lavender wands for sachets.  Judy was excited to think about selling her lavender with instructions to others on how to make the wands themselves using favorite colored ribbons.

As Helen created a wand and Judy and I watched, I spied a lavender blue paperback on Helen’s demonstration table. The title was Helen’s Garden and I thought it would be about raising flowers.  The subtitle, however, read, “What we learned about life and love in a small country school.”  I opened the book up at page 33 and began reading:

Habits

“Does anyone in this class know what the word habit means?” I printed it on the blackboard in big lower case letters.  A minute of serious study, then hands began to wave.

“Ginny, I notice that you have an idea to share.”  Gin always had an idea, right or wrong. She had learned to resist shouting out her answers, but her hand still waved furiously.

“Habit means when you spill your milk on the table,” she said.

“Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ginny. “All the time. The glass of milk gets in my way.”

I was hooked on the warmth and direct quality of the writing.  Turning to the back cover, I read:

Helen’s Garden is the fictionalized memoir of a master teacher returning to her first love—the classroom—after 20 years away. It’s a book that will call any reader toward the teaching profession, while asking how and why we learn, and how and why we teach what we do in our schools.  It doesn’t ask these questions directly, but simply tells stories with gentle humor, humility and compassion.

 Inside the back cover, a reprint of a newspaper article from The Sequim Gazette, March 12, 2003 explained the origins of the book.  In 1963, Helen Mitchell had created the first kindergarten classes in the tiny country school outside Enumclaw, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State.  With what she calls “my crafty little mind,” Helen cleverly overcame obstacles such as no classroom, no blackboard and no funding. At times she used harmless mischief to create a dynamic class in the school auditorium.  Sticks and dirt were her blackboard, and she used snowflakes to teach fractions.

A sidebar in the article explained that Helen wrote her book at the bedside of her second husband, who was suffering from a lingering illness.  Sad and feeling helpless, she gained strength from the encouragement of a friend from the little rural school she had taught at as well as a TV producer who had himself attended a little country school to get the stories down.  They felt that using the time she sat by her husband’s beside to write about her love of teaching would help her.  It did help, and when her husband said he did not want a memorial service, Helen did some soul searching.  She wanted to be alive for her memorial, she realized.  To her that meant selling her twocarat diamond earrings to finance the publishing of her stories.  Today she donates proceeds from the book to local community causes.

About memorials, Helen says:

When they stand up at the podium and say all those beautiful things about the person who’s in the box of ashes or the casket, I wonder if anyone said those things to them while they were alive.  I think people should look in their jewelry boxes and their garages and see what they can give now.  I got a card the other day from a former colleague that says, “Your spirit as a person and a teacher is archetypal goodness and creativity.”  If I never get another card, this will be enough.

When people who know me need closure after I die, they can just take the book off the shelf and read it.

Indeed, Helen’s spirit is on every page, reminding readers about honesty, openness, and the value of listening. In a chapter on teaching her kindergarteners the meaning of the word “conference” because parent-teacher conferences were coming up, Mitchell writes:

“I have been teaching you lots of new things, and your family always wants to know what kinds of things you’re doing in school so we have a conference.”  I held up the notices.

I will send this note home with you today. It will ask your mom or dad or grandma or someone important in your family to come and visit me so I can tell them how smart you are.  I never tell bad things about you.

Eyes brightened and heads turned to look at one another.  Nervous giggles escaped from behind curled fingers.

“Kindergarteners are never bad,” I said.  “Did you know that?  They are never bad.  Sometimes they use poor judgment, but that doesn’t make them bad, or naughty.  I like my kindergartners even when they use poor judgment.  I just love you, no matter what.

Mitchell continues:

You can have a conference with me if you ask for one.  If you have something you need to share with no one else listening, you may come and ask me for a conference.”

When two little girls asked for a comference, Mitchell asked where they’d like to have it.  Outside the door worked well and with a little hesitation the more courageous of the two shared their concern:

“You look much better with your horns this morning,” she said, pointing to my spit curls.

“My horns?” I said, touching one of the curls. “Yes,” she said, “You have horns just like those on that animal from Africa we saw in the movie yesterday….Yesterday you didn’t wear your horns and today you did. You’re prettier with horns.”

“Oh, thank you, girls,” I said. “I feel happy about this conference. You had a lot of courage, and you used very good judgment in asking for a private conference.  I’ll try to always wear my horns to school from now on.”

Not long after meeting Helen, I emailed her to learn more about how she got her book out into the world.  I smiled at the memories she included about her publisher when she emailed me back:

“You can’t leave your readers hanging like that. You need a beginning, a middle and an end!” Mark Jaroslaw told me.  He runs Niche Press, which specializes in law books but also takes on subsidized projects.  During the writing and editing process, he pleaded until he got the responses he was looking for. “Okay, okay, okay, Helen, so you’re not an author, but you are a story-teller, and you’re going to have to own that. Remember, Helen Mitchell is one of a kind, and her story and use of language have an unforgettable bell-like quality.”

In addition to inspiring me, Mark organized the chapters, and he went to several towns to dig in dusty archives for pictures of school children taken in the early sixties. I’ve never met him, but he’s a special influence in my old age! I have a profound sense of gratitude for what he has done for me. Only once did he kind of “lose it.” That was when he received a copy of the Sequim Gazette article and SHOUTED, “All in color, and above the fold!” It seemed temporarily out of character for this low-key, even-tempered and patient man.

My only writing experience before tackling this book was in the early seventies when I stumbled into a job as chairman of the advisory board of Science and Children Magazine. Teachers were doing interesting things in science, but didn’t know how to write their experiences, so I was doing editing, without any background or experience for the job! I was an oddball because at a time when science materials were available only to teachers in 6th grade and up, I was teaching science to kindergartners. I was “pushed” into writing, but never have felt competent. Mark was a most unusual publisher, active listener, and a man of great patience. After one of our conversations, he said, “Now, Helen, just write up what you’ve been telling me.”

With the first chapter, I simply was not organized, nor did I have a clue what was missing. Before I started working with Mark, a publisher from back East advised me, “There is nothing wrong with your stories, but you need to break them down into sections, like Parents, School, and Children.” That went over my head completely. He was trying to get me organized, but his forte was mystery novels.  Mark suggested the titles of the three sections as they are in the book:  “The Adventure Begins,” “A Day in the Life” and “Turning Point.”

The closing chapter was like pulling hen’s teeth! The truth can get very boring, but the way my teaching came to a screeching halt was the close juxtaposition of several life-changing incidents unfolding within a two-week period. Real life is stranger than fiction! A week before school closed, and I was retiring and in the process of moving from a home in Seattle to our summer home at Diamond Point, in Sequim. my husband was hospitalized with a sudden heart attack. Mt. St. Helen’s blew and a week following his attack, my husband died.

Many years after losing him so suddenly as I was retiring and at the bedside of my dying second husband, I wrote this book. I had to close the chapters of the book “and not leave your readers hanging in the breeze” as Mark put it.  I wrote about a day when a sudden lightening storm with high winds scared the children and filled our room with puddles from a leaking roof.  To involve the children rather than let them be preoccupied with fear, I took out a tape recorder so we could record the sounds of the storm.  When the janitor came to mop up the water, I told him, “We are recording a symphony, a symphony of the raindrops.  You want to hear it? I t has crashes of thunder, raindrops and wind.”  He helped me move the piano to a dry corner and set to work on mopping.  With the piano, a rumble of drums, pinging of triangles, scraping of sand paper blocks and cymbals, the class performed “The Symphony of the Raindrops.”

Then, I wrote a short chapter about my decision to retire.  A larger, wealthier school district had swallowed up my little country school and distant specialists would write the kindergarten curriculum.  I felt this was the time for me to make plans for a new future.  I wrote to my past students inviting them to visit me on the Olympic Peninsula where I was to retire.  Many invited me to weddings and baby showers.

My retirement on the Peninsula didn’t work out as I’d expected. The stories I wrote were a foil for the creeping depression I was experiencing after four years of caretaking of a second husband. The next two years of his nursing home residence, I simply scratched out memories while he dozed, just to stay sane. Memories of those halcyon days served as medicine for the soul.

And although writing my book at his bedside helped me reinvest in my life and its meaning, ultimately, there was a part of the grieving process, which had never been taken care of.  As I worked on an epilogue to satisfy Mark’s need for feeling completion, I wrote:

I always thought of myself as a facilitator. Someone who saw the wisdom in those little brains and wanted them to recognize the gifts with which they were born. “And while I was there, I learned how to “stay in the moment even though it took many hours of planning to create those moments.”

It still feels like a miracle to me that a publisher of law books would take this fledgling under his wing and work so hard to accomplish something. I owe him total credit for ever getting a book out! He is very self-effacing and gives credit to his designer, who involved her five-year-old daughter.

*****

I am pleased to share Helen’s commitment with the Writing It Real Community.  So many of us have life experience we want to record and pass on. So many of us believe wisdom drawn from our experiences have value to others. So many of us are looking for the editor and publishers who can help us. How many of us, though, will sell something of value to make sure the job is financed? I think Helen may be on to something with her idea of supporting having a memorial while we are alive.  She is certainly fortunate to have found a publisher who helped her organize the stories she had to tell compellingly.  If you are interested in ordering the book, you can email Helen at helenmitchell1@msn.com. The book plus tax comes to $16.18 and Helen will cover the shipping.

I think all of us might take a lesson here.  Write from our passion. Show what we offered the world and what the world offered us.  As Helen says in the final pages of her book, “In that way, the teacher becomes the student, the student a teacher, all with the binding force of love….”