Along the Road to Home

One of my most vivid memories of early childhood is that of having popcorn for lunch on Saturdays back at the old farm in the Sandhill country of Harvey County, Kansas.  Without fail, each Saturday for the longest of times my mother would whip up a huge batch of salted and buttery popcorn for all 7 of us kids to enjoy.  We'd all stand there wide-eyed and watch her pour it into the old metal milk pan.  I can still remember that scrumptious taste and the savory smell it made while it was popping.  It was always a treat for the taste buds! Once I asked my mom when I had children of my own, why it was that she always made it for us on Saturdays.  For some reason it always struck me odd that the 7 of us kids got a treat that was normally reserved for other times of the day.  I remember the look on her face when she explained the "popcorn for Saturday lunch" ritual to me with a voice that I can still hear now many years after she has been gone. "I always fi...

For some strange reason yesterday at the noontime, I was drawn to an old tree on our playground at school.  After nearly two years of teaching at Grandfield Elementary, you would have thought I'd have taken notice of it long before yesterday.  It's not like it just popped up out of the ground over the long 3-day weekend.  As a matter of fact, it's obvious that old landmark has been there for quite a spell.   The kids were outside playing in the cool and windy weather, many of them on the northwest corner of our playground.  As I was out amongst them checking in and seeing what they were doing, that stately old tree caught my eye.  Almost immediately I was drawn over to it, not because some child was doing something they shouldn't have been doing at recess, but rather because I noticed the interesting striations within the trunk's bark. I just had to go over and look at it closely. Perhaps I have been doing way too much adulting lately.  My...

Our first week of five has been completed in an arrangement of tiny cabin living, and we are now well into week number 2.  It's been interesting to settle into this little place and make adjustments as needed to the way we have been used to living for the past 4 years here along the Red River.  Overall it has been a very acceptable option for us with few problems.  For that Mike and I are most grateful.   Today there will be no school due to inclement weather.  This is Mike's day off as well so we may be finding ourselves stuck inside for the better part of the day.  It's ok.  I think the extra rest will be good for both of us.  Tomorrow it will be back to my regular routine and the little ones that I teach and love. Last week during a bit of quiet time at school, I listened as the kids were finishing up their work.  They were talking amongst themselves and the discussion came up of my leaving.  I heard one child say to another...

When we first came to the Red River area back in 2015, I ended up with a teaching position 30 miles to the southeast of us here in Burkburnett.  I was the language arts teacher for grades 4-6 at the elementary school in Petrolia, a small town of under 1,000 people. It was a new type of position for me, but since I love language and writing it seemed to be a perfect fit.   One of the very first assignments I gave my more than 120 students was to write about what it had been like to endure a drought of well over 3 years.  It was one that had finally broken only a couple of months before Mike and I made it here.  Their stories and heartfelt remembrances of all they endured simply because there was no water to be had were quite eye opening to me.  One of the most touching of their memories was that of a young 5th grade girl who, rather than telling me something bad that she remembered, relayed with a smile on her face a special message. "We couldn't use ou...

As a blogger since 2010, I have made hundreds of blog posts from all over the country.  In some of the strangest of places I have sat at a computer keyboard and talked about things that were meaningful to me.   One of my very first blogposts came from the inside of a tent near the high school at Tribune, Kansas on the Bike Across Kansas of 2011.  It was very short and sweet, probably no more than 100 words as I passed along to my family and friends back in Hutchinson that I was alive and well with a thousand other cyclists whose ambition it was to peddle across the great state of Kansas. I wrote dozens upon dozens of stories from the dining room of my old house back home in Reno County, Kansas.  The most memorable of them were from the over 9 months of recuperation time it took when I broke my left arm in an unfortunate bicycle accident right in front of my own house one August morning in 2011.  I learned to type one-handed and sometimes it was with ...

Altus, Oklahoma is a wonderful community and one that is only a little over an hour's drive away from us here in Burkburnett.  I've known of Altus for nearly 40 years now because it was the first duty station that my brother-in-law Wes had after returning from Korea while he was in the Air Force.  It ended up being the last base that he was stationed at, and in 1991 he retired as a Senior Master Sergeant from there.  My sister Sherry was a teacher for Altus Public Schools with most of her over 42 years in education being spent at Roosevelt Elementary on Glenda Street.  From 1979 onward, Altus was their home.  They knew that southwestern Oklahoma town and its people very well.  There was no way that Sherry and I would ever get through the local United grocery store or Walmart without at least a couple of kids running up to her and saying...... "Momma look!  It's Mrs. St. Clair!" I was a witness to many an impromptu parent-teacher conference in th...