May 11

Dear Families,

This is the first spring I've had time to begin looking for fiddleheads in the woods.  When I went into the marshy section behind my house this morning, I found myself unable to scan the forest floor the way I usually do when I'm looking for wildflowers.  Fiddleheads, I've learned, best come from ostrich ferns, and ostrich ferns push their way out of the leaves, surrounded by a papery brown.  They are best harvested when they first emerge, so essentially one is looking for a low, brown knuckle that masks a beautiful, jade green scroll with a deep U-shaped groove.  

I traipsed slowly through wet spots.  Taller ferns with white fuzziness called my attention, but I ignored them.  I lost track of where I had been.  I had a hard time judging how long I had been looking.  Eventually, a few clusters appeared by chance, and I headed back with about a quarter of my coffee cup filled with tiny disks.

Nowadays, each week the landscape shifts, and we need to reorient ourselves and learn to read the signs anew.  The ground rules for how we can move forward as a school begin to take shape.  A task force of faculty and board are taking a look at current child care regulations in order to imagine the early childhood protocols we will need to have in place for when school starts again.   When these parameters become clearer, we will be grateful to turn our creative energies to designing new ways to learn together with special focus on time spent outdoors.  

It's pretty easy to keep doing what we've "always" done, harder to translate that off-site, and most difficult, to recognize new possibilities in unfamiliar terrain.  I am reminded that the more of us who are seeking together carefully and thoughtfully, the more we'll find.

Sincerely,
Jenny
—-
Jenny Rowe
Head of School