Hello everyone tonight

You know that as I am sitting here, my mind slips back in time about 70 years infact, I am just getting ready for school and mother who is now 101 and counting ismaking sure that I am bundled up warm, there is a noise--bells--and up drives our school bus of that time--a team of horses and farm sleigh, full of kids, I am jumping on for the short drive to ss#10 the one room school just up the road

There really was no excuse to not go to school, because this sleigh also carried the teacher, actually it worked quite well, we were just like one big family--I was just 4.5 years old at the time---going right into grade one--

With Christmas right around the corner the days now were filled with practices for the Christmas concert--that was after we got warmed up around the old pot bellied wood stove someone had started about an hour or so before we arrived--also had to thaw out the ink wells that froze overnight--but start we always did, lessons first students from each grade would recite or do work on the blackboards, us younger ones would study with wonder the complexity of the grades ahead of us, and wonder how we would ever master those things--

The cabinet at the side of the room contained all the various books needed to slowly get us to master the alphabet, and word sounds as we put together simple ones that rhymed as I remember it---

right next to it stood another cabinet and shelf with a very large dictionary, the pages of which had many years of leaves pressed, the smell of which I can still remember--it will never go away---so wonderful--you know in those daysback in the fall of the year--you would go on excursions to the bush to retrieve more leaves from the different trees and learn their different characteristics--another thing we did was pick the ripe milkweed pods for their silk, the bags of which was sent away for the war effort raging then in Europe--it seemed so far away--life went on as usual for us other than rationing, and local soldiers coming and going--

My mother decided to visit her mother in California--dad was up on the Alaska highway (1943) and away we went on the train from Morrisburg--quite a trip indeed--another unusual thing happened on this trip--

MORE TO THIS STORY!!!!

hope you enjoy

NH