I love a cliffhanger as much as the next person.  What is going to happen next?  Will the characters survive?  What makes a story a cliffhanger is that there is no closure.  No happy ending.  Everybody lives happily ever after.  One of the things that makes me crazed is not knowing when the cliffhanger will be resolved – I want to know what happens.  At the very least, I need to have a date to look forward to.

Today I walked out of my school, having stored things so the custodians could clean, taking the things I thought I would need to teach remotely and cleaning out some other things I had kept for years.  There will be no spring concert, maybe no end of year activities, maybe no goodbye.  I saw a few of my kids as I was leaving the building who waved and yelled “Hi Mrs. Bush” from a safe distance.  There were kids riding bikes, skating and playing basketball.  But there would be no hugs today and maybe not for a very long time.

I had done really well the last three days as I had finished grades, participated in numerous zoom meetings, took things off of walls and filled boxes.  Our team got together twice for meals today, seated safely at individual tables in he media center, celebrating two birthdays with our favorite donuts and then again this afternoon for lunch.

At the end of the day as I was finishing up, they all came to my room to say goodbye.  There were tears and hugs (Covid19 be damned), and not having any idea of of when we might see each other in person again, we promised to check in with each other once a week over coffee or wine.  A teaching team is interesting.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to work with this one at first but like any family, people grow on you.  We know each others idiosyncrasies, each others families and even what everyone’s favorite donut is.  Most of us have worked together every day for nearly four years.  We opened the school together.  Today was hard.

After loading Doug’s car with stuff, I walked around the room one last time to make sure everything was as it should be, turned off the lights and locked the doors.  I grabbed my stuffed purple crayon, (I am an elementary teacher after all), my purse and book bag and walked out the school doors.

Tomorrow is a new day and if the last three days have been any indication, the future will be full of surprises, both great and small, some good and some bad.  It will be important for all of to reach out to each other, to get over being afraid of bothering someone because they might be busy.  At some point we will all need an encouraging voice, a friendly smile and perhaps share a Diet Coke or glass of wine through a screen.  The cliffhanger has only begun.  Now we just have to wait until the sequel.