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| Category: The Sacred In Everyday Life |
Date published: November 2, 2005 |
I walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, and when I've entered, have forgotten the reason I went there. I'm closing in on age sixty-one and already I'm able to hide my own Easter eggs. The human mind is a strange thing, for even though it forgets things in the present, is capable of remembering the gone by years, a blessing and curse of growing old.
My one-room schoolhouse still stands, its once white siding, now, a dingy gray. The first time my youngest daughter saw it, she said, "It looks like the school on Little House on the Prairie." I attended this little school from kindergarten through the second or third grade before transferring by bus each morning to the new school with one grade for each teacher. But it wasn't that way in my one-room schoolhouse, there. There, it was one teacher for seven grades, kindergarten through the sixth grade, and each row was a different grade. Except for the kindergarten class, they gathered around a large wooden table in the front of the room. My class consisted of six students, Sharon, Viola, Janet, Leroy, Richard, and myself, and all day long, we played with blocks, looked at books, and colored. I don't recall having done much else while in the kindergarten class, but I do remember...there was no horsing around, fidgeting, or otherwise disruptive behavior. Despite the lack of teaching in that lowest grade, we learned. Our little minds, like sponges, taking in the lessons taught to the children in the older grades.
Each desk had a hole in the upper left-hand corner, once used to hold a jar of liquid ink, but now, to hold the paper cups filled with orange juice each morning. In the back, right-hand corner, of the room was a small kitchen. I said in the beginning that I could recall everything of long ago, but I've forgotten what the cook, Mrs. Roberts, made us all for lunch. Next to the kitchen was a huge, (huge as I remember for one so small) black cast iron stove that burned wood and coal to heat the school. In the back, left-hand corner of the room was a door that led to a storage room, and in there was stored the coal.
At the front left-hand corner of the room was a coat closet. On occasion, we little girls were allowed to carry our dolls to school, and in there is where we'd play at times in winter, but more often, outdoors is where we played. Along the side of the school was a band of trees, and near them is where we younger children assisted the older kids in building a snow fort. Oh, it was grand, shaped like an igloo and large enough to hold several children.
I learned a tap dance as a wee one while there, and can still perform it to this day, to my family's embarrassment, for I've demonstrated my great talent to them from time to time throughout the years. I find I've retained the memory of the sadness in my life as a child, but gratefully, have also clung to the happy, more pleasant, memories of my youth.
I've been told the school is used to hold grain now. A mobile home stands at its side, and its occupants, most likely, unaware of the memories that worn out old schoolhouse still holds for many of us who attended there. I pray it'll never be torn down or any other little one-room schoolhouse still existing today. Let them stand as remembrance of an era long ago, and mine, that little one-room schoolhouse in Upper Michigan, let it stand for me.
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In My Own Words: Out-of-the-Ordinary Experiences
