The morning glories and the school bus arrived within a couple of weeks of one another in August…a color duo of the clearest blue sky and a flaming burnt orange sunset.
All summer my mother protected the few morning glories that had extended their vines up the south-facing kitchen windows, supported by twine tied in place each year by my dad.
Our weather was almost always completely dry in late July and August. Average moisture in those parts averaged fourteen inches annually, and that included snow melt. Any annuals, including the morning glories, sweet peas, and cosmos had to be watered frequently by hand.
About the third or fourth week in August with the first frost usually less than a month away, the long buds of the glory-of-the-morning would announce the next day’s blooming schedule.
It became a ritual to count the next day’s buds. There are two or three a day at first and then the count rises until we have thirty or forty every day – gone by noon on a day with hot sunshine and lasting until evening if it is cloudy and cool.
The morning glories gave every depth of blue they had for their moments of glory or, at the most, hours of glory that had begun in the morning.
In April of 1950 an envelope had come to our mailbox addressed to me. It was an invitation from the first grade class inviting me to attend a party being held for the fall first graders. Our mothers brought us in that day and we were officially welcomed into the first grade room where we would learn to use the thick lead pencils and each take care of a small jar of white paste that had a bulky and awkward brush in it.
In September we arrived in all seriousness, carrying our Big Chief tablets, the girls in their cotton dresses and the boys in their new shirts and jeans. We found our individual desks where there was a card with our name on it, where we sit quietly and learn for about six and a half hours every day, five days a week, for the next nine months. The only activities that took place away from our desks was an occasional show and tell (such as bird nests, leaves, or butterflies) that the teacher arranged on a large side table where we would look and occasionally touch.
There were three large classrooms on the first floor of the old brick school building and three on the second floor. There was no office in the building since the sixth grade teacher doubled as principal and she managed her domain from her class room.
The bathrooms for the entire building were in the basement. On the first day of school the first graders (many of us from country homes where outhouses were the norm) were quite courteously taken to the basement bathrooms and received practical instruction about the use of the modern conveniences.
It always intrigued me that apparently they didn’t realize that we all had aunts and uncles and cousins whose homes were packed to the wazoo with completely modern bathroom facilities and appliances. We knew how to use that stuff, for cryin’ out loud, and didn’t even think of it as all that special although I suppose there might have been one or two who did.
School always started right after Labor Day so as the morning glories began blooming we could expect to see the big school bus drive in. In all of its sturdy orange presence it came, turning off the county road 3/4 mile from our house and raising a mighty cloud of dust as it swirled around the last curve into the yard with only the driver and someone taking notes on board. The driver would have a brief visit with the parents at each farm, giving them the approximate times their youngsters would be picked up and dropped off.
Our farmstead was nine miles out of town by the closest route. The farthest pickup was about eight miles east of us and the route extended some miles north as well. The route required to pick up the fifteen or eighteen students (grades 1-12) from the scattered farms meant a seventy-five minute ride for whoever was picked up first and at least a twenty minute (grateful) ride for whoever was picked up last. Those first on in the morning had the shortest commute in late afternoon when they were dropped off first.
The bus drivers were business men from town whose work allowed them to schedule this part time job around the beginning and end of each school day. They did not wear uniforms – they wore their work clothes. They were never late and, as I recall, very rarely sick or absent for any reason. They all knew all of our parents, and we knew they did. Behavior problems at a level requiring action never occurred. If one or two of the boys actually got rowdy enough that a boundary needed to be asserted, that boundary was easily established by the driver repeatedly looking in his rear-view mirror at the offending student until direct eye contact was made and held.
A perfectly silent conversation then ensued along the lines of:
Driver, silently: I see what you’re doing.
Student, silently: I just realized that.
Driver, silently: Are ya gonna knock it off?
Student, silently: Yes, sir.
Driver, silently: If you don’t, when we get to your house I will pull up in front of the house, stop, turn the bus engine off, walk up to the front door and speak with your mother. Are we clear?
Student, silently: Yes, sir. Please don’t talk to my mother. We are clear.
The high school kids on the bus were not mean to the little ones, and the boys weren’t (too) mean to the girls. When we were gathered on that bus we were with our lifelong neighbors, some cousins and Sunday School classmates, and the children of our parents’ friends. It was an extended daily gathering of our neighbors and childhood friends that reflected the same routine, year after year.
We would drive by the church organist’s farm. He also owned an airplane that he flew around the county spraying farmers’ crops. His dad lived at the next farm. And his brother at the farm beyond that owned a speed boat. That brother and his wife had six children, two of whom never rode the bus because of disabilities. One son had cerebral palsy and in those days, such a boy just lived at home until he died in his early twenties. They also had a severely retarded daughter with physical disabilities who was cared for by her mama until she died at a young age.
There was no change in the population of the school bus with the exception of those who graduated or the occasional, envied teen who acquired their own beat-up car. No one new ever moved into the community during those decades and only as a result of the death of the farmer/the head of the family/the husband did the wife and children move out. Those infrequent occasions were noted somberly and silently.
The children riding the buses with us were the grandchildren of the men and women who had come there with wagons and horses forty-five years earlier to claim homesteads. I was born in 1944 so was too young to understand World War II, but I knew that one farm we went by on the bus each day was a sad place because their son had died in the war.
Three young soldiers from our little community died in the Pacific.
Their parents, brutally grieved, never recovered from the loss.
They weren’t expected to.
They just got quieter and kept farming.
Previously published about the beginning of school:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2013/09/22/mailboxes-and-old-barns-the-first-day-of-school-2/
