Day 10: Mila's Spelling

An old proverb says that practice makes perfect.

Mila would like a word with whoever said it first.

Dear Grandmother,

Mila cannot spell. That is not quite fair. Mila can spell beautifully out loud. Ask her to spell "because" and she will say every letter in the right order, with her chin up. Then ask her to write it, and something happens between her head and her pencil. The letters come out in a different order, or one goes missing, or a b turns round and becomes a d.

This week she has started hiding her spelling book under her reading book. Today she cried a little, very quietly, over the word "friend", and when Pip leaned over to help, she told him to mind his own business.

Noor and Bea can fill a whole page while Mila is still on her first line, and she knows it. Children always know exactly where they stand in a class, the way everyone at a table knows who got the smallest slice.

It was parents' evening tonight. Not really an evening, just an hour after school with the stove lit and the parents sitting on children's chairs with their knees too high. Ida's mother came, and Yuri's grandparents, and Tomas, still in his work jacket with sawdust on the sleeves. He sat on the smallest chair in the room without seeming to notice it and asked me straight out, "Is she behind?"

I said she was not behind in anything except writing words down, and that she knew more words than most of the class. I said I thought she was frightened of the pencil. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said that he had been the same at school, and that nobody had noticed, and that he had simply decided he was stupid and stopped trying. "I'm not having that for her," he said. He said it plainly, the way you would say you were not having damp in the house.

So I told him what we had tried that afternoon, and you would have liked it. I borrowed a baking tray from Dora and shook a thin layer of flour into it, like dusting a table before rolling pastry. Mila wrote "friend" in the flour with one finger, saying each letter as she drew it. Then she shook the tray gently, the word disappeared, and she wrote it again. No pencil, no rubber, no page that stays wrong. She did it nine times. On the tenth she wrote it on paper, and it was right. Anyone could try it at a kitchen table with a tray and a handful of flour.

When the other parents had gone, I showed Tomas the tray. He looked at it for a while. Then he wrote his daughter's name in the flour with one big finger, carefully, the way he must measure a beam. Mila, who had been waiting by the stove, came and looked and said his M was too wide. He said it was a generous M. She laughed for the first time all day.

An aside, because I wanted to know why the flour worked when the pencil did not. Before paper was cheap, children learned their letters on slates, or by drawing in a shallow tray of sand. A slate could be wiped clean with a cloth, and a mistake cost nothing. There is something in that. When a mistake can be shaken away, a child is braver. And moving a whole finger through something soft seems to help the hand remember the shape, the way your hands remember how much salt to throw in without measuring.

I swept the flour into the bin after they had gone and found a little of it still on the stove rail, white and soft. The classroom smelled faintly of a kitchen. Before she went home, Mila wrote a note to go back to Dora with the tray. It says "Thank you, friend", and every letter is in the right place.

Practice makes perfect, says the proverb. Mila does not think so, because she has practised "friend" in her spelling book every day for a week and it has been wrong every day. But I think the proverb leaves something out. Practice makes perfect only when it is safe to be wrong. Nine times in the flour, and nobody saw any of the mistakes. The tenth time stayed. I suppose that is true of other things besides spelling.

Your Vera

Day 11: The First Frost

Epictetus taught that people are not troubled by things, but by the opinions they hold about things.

I read that line this morning while my coffee went cold, and I did not like it, because I wanted to be troubled by things.

Dear Grandmother,

The first frost came last night. When I walked down to the shore before school, every reed along the lake was white, and each stalk had grown a row of tiny feathers on one side only. The water between them was black and very still. It looked like a kitchen after someone has wiped every surface and gone to bed.

My mother telephoned yesterday evening. She had been to see you, as she does every Sunday, and she said you were calm, ate all your soup and asked twice whether the bus was late. Then she asked if I was still writing to you. I said yes. She asked if I was bringing the letters. I said no, they stay in your blue tin on my shelf. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said it was a strange thing, to write to someone who cannot read, and that it worried her.

I should have let it rest there. Instead I said that she visits you because it helps you, and I write because it helps me, and that these are not so different. She said that was not the point. She said that in the spring a card from an old friend made you cry for a whole afternoon, and that she will not watch that happen again. I said I had never asked to bring anything. She said, "Then why do you sound as if I had forbidden you?" We went on like that, around and around, like two people stirring the same pot from opposite sides.

When we put the phones down, nothing had changed. The letters are still in the tin. My mother still visits on Sundays. Only the evening was spoiled.

So I tried something, and you could try it too, the next time a conversation goes wrong. I took a sheet of paper and drew a line down the middle. On the left I wrote only the words my mother actually said, as exactly as I could. On the right I wrote what I had heard. On the left: "It worries me." On the right: "You are doing something wrong." On the left: "I will not watch that happen again." On the right: "I do not trust you with her." The left side was much shorter, and much kinder.

I folded the paper and put it in the stove. It burned quickly, the way a dry recipe card would, with a small bright edge.

Leon asked at school today why the frost was only on one side of the reeds, so we looked it up in a book from the cupboard. Frost on reeds is not frozen dew. On a still, very cold night, the water in the air turns straight into ice without becoming liquid first, and the ice grows in fine needles wherever damp air touches a cold surface. The faint wind carries the damp, so the crystals build on the side it comes from, layer by layer, like sugar crusting on the edge of a pan. Sofia said that meant the reeds were wearing their coats backwards. Leon said no, they were wearing them the right way, to face the cold. I let them argue. They were both partly right, which is the best kind of argument for a classroom.

By noon the sun had found the reeds and the feathers were gone. The reeds were green and brown again, a little bent, and the lake was moving.

At lunch Dora warmed a pan of milk on the classroom stove, and the children drank it with both hands round their mugs. Sofia asked whether you had frost like this in your year. I said I did not know, but that the reeds have grown in the same place for longer than anyone in the town can remember, so they probably wore the same white coats for you, when you walked down to the shore before school.

I think Epictetus was right, and that is why I did not like him this morning. The telephone call was a few sentences long. What troubled me all evening was the meaning I laid over it, like a heavy lid on a pot that only needed to simmer. My mother is afraid for you. So am I. We are afraid in different ways, that is all.

So this letter goes into the tin like the others, between the cards for caraway bread and barley soup, and the lid goes on.

Your Vera