Beltane                                                                            Solstice Moon

Up early.  Thank you, noisy dogs.  Breakfast, read paper then out to the apple trees for more bagging.  On two of our trees, the honeycrisp and the northerly tree (whose variety name I can’t recall), we have well over 200 apples, closer to 250.

( a honeycrisp last year)

The third tree (whose name I can’t recall either right now) has ten.  Not sure what happened to it.  It only blossomed on the most westerly branches and then sparsely.  Like the other two it had leaf rollers active early, but the leaves otherwise look healthy and the leaf rollers don’t explain, at least I don’t think they do, the minimal blooms and even smaller fruit set.  Anyhow the apples have all got bags and within, roughly, the best time.  Best time, when they’re larger than a pea, got rained on and on and on, but at the first dry moment, we’re done.

Also laid down leaf mulch in the vegetable garden, at least until the sun got high in the sky and my skin began to give off a faint burnt odor.  Back at that one tomorrow morning.  At that point the time critical chores for the garden will be done.  That will mean I can adopt my writing in the am and translating in the pm schedule again.  I’m ready.

Latin last time was hard.  I missed several obvious elements in my translation and in general felt like a schlub.  My first reaction in those instances is to wonder if this is the time to throw in the towel.  Have I gone as far as it’s reasonable to have gone.  And besides it costs a lot to have a tutor, maybe if I do gone on, I should just do it on my own.  If I haven’t gotten this stuff by now,  what makes me think I’ll ever get it?  You know the drill.

(Justus.  transferred to I.S. 318 at age 10.  Already had a 2000+ rating.  Is now the youngest African-American national master ever.)

Then I watched Brooklyncastle.  This remarkable movie, available for instant streaming on Netflix, details a year and a half in I.S. 318, a public junior high in the NYC school system.  Here’s a quick plot summary from IMDB:

“Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 – an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level – that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. (If Albert Einstein, who was rated 1800, were to join the team, he’d only rank fifth best). Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a “school in need of improvement” to one of New York City’s best. But a series of recession-driven pubic school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.”

One of the chess coaches makes a remark about learning chess to the effect that many students just learn and learn and learn, don’t do well, then their knowledge jumps up a notch.  It’s that sudden leap in learning, up to another plateau, that I recognized from Latin education so far.  Which means that I’m slogging right now in the swamp between plateaus, the dense plant life and boggy water pulling me down, but what I need to know is keep at it, just keep at it.  Then, I’ll jump to the next plateau, which will be a whole new swamp, perhaps a Grand Marais as we might say in Minnesota.  But those kids taught me to pay attention to what I already know.

(Rochelle.  On her way to being the first African-American female Master)