Ex Post Facto

These brief writings of 2009-2010 were a place to record and reflect on what was to be my last year of teaching. A brief note about confidentiality: the children who appear in these stories – including my own daughter – have been given pseudonyms. I too, writing then as caprac, remained an anonymous source. It is my hope that my vague and idiosyncratic descriptions of place, along with the invented names, will protect the privacy of the people, young and old, on whose stories I have here reflected. It was my hope to describe my days, parts of my days: to hold them steady a little while in the stream of time. I leave these stories here, these days stacked like stones in a cairn, heaped together they are as true, whole, and small as I could manage.