Along the Road to Home

64 years ago today, my mom was a busy woman.  Child #6, that was me, had decided to make the 26th day of October her official birthday.  I was born after about 8 hours of "let's get this over with!" labor in the old hospital that was called "Bethel Deaconess" back in Harvey County, Kansas. Old "Doc Schmidt", the physician who had delivered 4 out of 5 previous siblings, came whistling down the hallway after spending the night out drinking and dancing with his wife.  The hospital staff had tried in vain to reach him in order to relay the urgent message that Lois Scott was fixing to have a baby.  It was to no avail.  I will always remember how my mom described what the Catholic nun, Sister Marietta, told her when she expressed fear that no one could locate her doctor. "You know Lois, we don't really need him anyways.  You and I could do this without him.  We've done this before!" Shortly before my 10:32 a.m. birth, the door swung o...

Over the past nearly 64 years I have collected many memorable things.  As a teenager it had to have been 45 rpm records and 33 1/3 LP albums from the generation that I grew up in called the '70s.  In my early 30's, I had a passion for collecting angels of different sizes and shapes. I had amassed so many of them that one day I just decided to give them all away.  Later on I cabbaged on to things like books, old crocks, and vintage linens.  My collections of things have come and mostly gone which was inevitable over the passage of that much time.  As of late, I have been collecting things that most people don't think of. I collect words. Never once did I figure that I would be a collector of such a thing, but the truth is that for the last 5 weeks or so my 22 5th graders and I have been doing just that.   As a teacher now for over 40 of those 64 years, I've seen children who stumbled upon a brand new word of which they had no idea of how to pronoun...

There is a sweet young lady that I know who takes it upon herself on a regular basis to deliver a message to me.  She's whispered quietly those heartfelt words so often and for some reason they are always given at just about the same time of the day. "Mrs. Renfro, you are a good teacher." I always answer her back in the same way. "Well, I try to be." Over the course of the last 8 weeks of school, my response to her has been sufficient.  She goes upon her way and I go mine.  Yesterday something was different when she met me at the classroom door.  She relayed the message and I relayed mine.  Thinking we were finished,  I started to move on   but that young lady wasn't quite done  this time.   "No Mrs. Renfro.  I mean it.  You really are a good teacher!"   Perhaps it was the tired look upon my face at the end of the day, one marked with yet even more that we could have gotten to but did not.  Maybe she he...