ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

               

ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

Hello neighbor. Glad you stopped by.

So there I was standing at the end of the driveway waiting for the yellow school bus to stop to pick me up just the way mother planned.  The ride to the one-room school house was about two miles. I think the bus came around 7:00-7:30.  It had to come a long ways to get to North Wayne to pick up the kids who were in high school because Wayne did not have a high school. This made the pick-up time early and the trip home late.   It was a long day for Kindergarteners who rode the bus to school.

  

The school house was a two story building with the classroom on the ground floor.  The second floor was a large hall with a stage for putting on events. There was a regular bathroom facility under the main floor.  The teacher’s desk was at the front of the room. The  desks  were the old wooden ones  where some of them had two students to a desk. The older classes sat in the back rows and the younger ones in the front.  I remember my first day I was able to sit in the back of the classroom with a girl I knew, but after that first day, I moved to the Kindergartener’s  front row.  The teacher’s desk  was  right in front of us.  There was a very large register in the floor where heat from the furnace in the cellar would keep us warm.  There was a large water bottle at the back of the room. Water was provided by the people in the house next door. There were very large black boards on the two side walls.

The  teacher  taught all 9 grades.  There  wasn’t  always kids for all nine grades, but the total would run from 20-30 total.  I loved school so I didn’t’ mind having to be there so long.  When I moved on to first and second grades, if I had my own work finished. I could take some of the Kindergartners up to the blackboard and help them with their letters and numbers.  There are more stories about happenings at the old one-room school, for another time.

Stop by again some sometime soon and we will have another little chat.

To my blogger friends. I found thing infomation on my home  page. Perhaps this would help you to log onto my post for "Confessions of a Simple Farm Girl"  Hope it helps you.
We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.

SINGING AT FAIRMONT HEALTH CARE

Hello. Glad you stopped by.

One Tuesday a month some of us from our church go to Fairmont to sing to the residents there. This morning my 101 year old Mom was sitting in the front row and I was standing in the front row of our group. When began to sing "The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood", I could see Mom was singing right along with us. Lots of time she sort of just closes her eyes and nods as she doesn't see too well. But this morning she was alert and with it.  After we finished the song, she was the only one who clapped and smiled and she even leaned over and spoke to the gentlemen in the wheel chair next to her.  It made me smile to see her interact like that.  God be with her always, I pray.

Stop by again some time soon and we will have another little chat.

Little Kids can be so cute

Glad you stopped by.

This morning at church, our Pastor was speaking about Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son, Isaac. The servant stopped at a well to rest. He asked God that when he asked one of the maidens to please give him a drink, and she says" Drink and I will water your camels, too." I will know  this is the one to be the wife for Isaac.  Pastor went on to explain that a camel can drive 40 gallons of water and that there were ten camels and that would be 400 gallons of water.  Across the church there was a little boy who said "Whoooooo" I guess he thought that was a lot of water. Anyway you could hear snickers all across the congregation. At least he was listening to the sermon.

Stop by again sometime soon and we'll have another little chat.

THE CRICK

THE CRICK

Hello Neighbor. Glad you stopped by.

In January of 1971, the company my husband, Al, worked for transferred him from Monmouth, Maine to the office in Buffalo, New York. We found a home in Alden on Irving Street. Now Irving Street was no  different from any other suburban street. It had neat houses on both sides with green lawns, trees and flowers. But this short street came to an abrupt end with a silver-gray guard rail. Standing there, looking beyond the rail, all one  could really see was just an empty old field, not used for much except growing weeds  and providing a place for bikers and motorcyclists.

But if you ventured across this not so exciting field, you would enter a patch of woods and there you would discover a “crick”. Now in Maine, I would call it a brook, a  stream  or  maybe a creek, but here it was a “crick”. It was here that our daughter and I and some of her little friends took a bag lunch and followed the crick. We looked for little frogs, pretty stones and listened to the water as it trickled down over the rocks. And yet, not far away was the rush, rush of the traffic on busy Broadway as the motorists hurried to and fro. But here, along the crick, as it meandered on its way, the rush  of the world was put aside for a while.

I could imagine the things one would  see, hear and find with the changing seasons. During the fall, footsteps would be hushed by the fallen leaves of brown, red and gold. Sunlight would filter through the trees creating a feeling of peace and serenity. Then Old Man Winter would come and change the scene with his decoration of snow on rocks and icicles hanging on twigs and grasses. Even the crick’s song would change from the mellowsome of October to a hollow sound as the water ran beneath the ice. Footprints of birds, rabbits, and other wildlife would crisscross in the new fallen snow. Branches of trees would drop their load of snow as one walked by, brushing them lightly with a shoulder.

Spring would follow bringing her warm rains to melt the snow and ice and now even the quiet crick takes on a sense  of rush as it hurries on  its way, so fast at times that it flows over the edges. Then the storms pass and the crick would return to its quiet meandering as the summer’s sun brings out the buzzing flies and once again the little frogs appear at the waters edge. The pretty stones could be seen and the music of the water heard, while all around the busy world continues to rush by.

Stop by again some time and we will have a little chat.

How I became a simple farm girl.

CONFESSIONS OF A SIMPLE FARM GIRL

Hello Neighbor. Glad you stopped by.

Let me introduce myself.  My grandfather and grandmother lived in a small community town  in the Pine Tree State of Maine.  They had a small gas and store business. My parents and I lived with them and my Uncle Jr. (my mother's younger brother).  My grandfather decided to buy a farm some place.  You see, my Uncle Jr.was born with a severe skin problem.  My grandfather thought a farm would be a better place for him. I suppose Uncle Jr. had to put up with a lot of “stuff” from kids being kids.  So Grampa  found  a 140 acre old farm house on a dirt road outside a very small place called North Wayne. Since Mom and Dad and I lived with them, we all packed up and moved to the farm

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There was a big farm house sitting on a hill and a big barn across the road. In a couple of years my sister came along making it kind crowded there. Mom and Dad and my sister and I moved from the big house to a small cabin that sat on a knoll just outside the back door.  It was just a one room building, but we made out o.k.  My mother told my father that by the time I reached 5 years old she wanted a house down at the bottom of the hill across the dirt road. She did not want me to have to go down that hill (especially when winter’s snows could be quite deep) to catch the school bus when I started Kindergarten.  And so he did.  A man who was a musical genius and not a farmer or a builder of houses.  Well, September came and so did my first day to go to school.    I just had to go out to the end of the driveway to stand and watch for that big yellow bus. I sure beat tramping down that hill in good or bad weather. And that’s how I became a simple farm girl.

Stop by again sometime soon, and we’ll have another little chat.