Along the Road to Home

The party is winding down for the 159th birthday of my home state on this Kansas Day of 2020.  Although 159 seems to be quite a formidable number, in comparison to let's say, Rhode Island, Kansas is just a teenager barely old enough to get behind the wheel of the family SUV with their learner's permit.  For over 55 years, Kansas was the place I made my home.  I was born there, raised up there, had my family there, and was sure I would die there.  I taught school and lived in the very same county all that time, never wandering around the rest of the state all that much.  South central Kansas and in particular, Reno County, was good enough for me.   Why would I look elsewhere? In 2013 that all changed. My first few months away from home as a newlywed living in the beautiful San Juan mountains of southwestern Colorado were painful.  I felt like a flower that had been ripped from its normal spot in the garden and haphazardly transplanted against t...

I slept in until 5:15 this morning and it was one of those moments when you say to yourself, "Wow, how did that happen?"  5:15 was my "time to get up" time from 25 years ago.  As the years have gone by, my alarms (both on my cell phone as well as my internal one) get set earlier and earlier.  Now my normal time to get up and start the day is usually 3:15, not two hours laster as it was this morning. Perhaps I needed the rest? As the months that lie ahead fly by faster and faster, pushing me towards the day when I finally say "time to retire",  I have to wonder what will I do with myself and all the extra hours and minutes of the day that will then be mine to use as I see fit.  After giving so very many years to the profession of education, I find it a mystery as to how I will see myself once the time comes that there are no more papers to grade, no more lesson plans to make, no more evaluations of how I am performing in the classroom, no more state a...

I look in the mirror each morning and say hello to the image of my mother, a wonderful woman who has been gone now since 2007.  We share the same eyes, the same smile, the shape of our face, and some have told me the sound of our voices.  It used to unnerve me, this idea of looking like her when I grew older.  I now accept it as the gift it is.  If you never knew my mom, all you have to do is look at me.  The older I get, the more I become the same woman that she once was. At age 64, I have grown to have an even greater respect for her than I have ever before.  I can't imagine how she made it on her own for the last 25 years of her life.  I know the aches and pains she had, mostly because she passed them on to me for enjoyment in my later years of life as well.  I remember her struggle financially as she eked by each month on the meager earnings of my father's social security check plus whatever little amount of extra spending money she could ...

The door to being a teacher continues to close for me, quite rapidly at times and as it does, a sobering fact always comes to mind.  I've been a teacher for more years than some of my colleagues this year at Liberty Elementary School have even been alive . I've been around a while.  Actually make that a very long while . When all is said and done, I will have spent considerably more than half of my life in the field of education.  Actually if you look at it another way in consideration of the time spent in the classroom as a student as well as being a teacher, I've been at it since the fall term of 1960.  I guess I might as well say that all of my life has been devoted to learning and sharing that knowledge with others who have called me their "teacher".   I hope in one form or another that I can still continue to learn even when my things are packed up and boxed away when the last day in the classroom finally arrives.  What a shame it would be t...

A nasty virus caught up with me on the first day back at school this past Tuesday.  I was teaching reading just about the 11:00 hour when all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks.  Chills came about my whole body and a feeling of extreme exhaustion set in.  Within the hour, I was already on the way home.  By the time I got to our driveway in Newkirk, I just turned the key off and sat behind the wheel.  I closed my eyes, waking up an hour later still sitting there in the front seat of my car safely buckled in. Luckily no one saw me and called 911 to have someone check on my welfare. Now that  would have been embarrassing.   The better part of the next 24 hours were spent sleeping, waking only to go to the bathroom, trying to swallow pills for fever relief, checking to see if I was really still alive, or to worry about who would take care of the kids at school.  I was well provided for by Mike who appeared at my bedside each hour or ...

We had a chance to catch the sunset tonight as we drove home to Newkirk from Arkansas City, Kansas.  It was Mike who noticed it first and he motioned to me as we headed south across the Kansas-Oklahoma line.  I grabbed my phone to catch a picture of it. As the sun continued to sink lower and lower into the western horizon, I could not help but to be reminded of what a blessing it is to be able to see both the sun rise and the sun set during the course of a normal day.  It's a sign that we have survived yet another 24 hours and that the good Lord still has plans for us here on earth.  For those of us (myself included) who take life for granted from time to time, we would all do well to remember a sobering thought. Somewhere out there was a person who saw the sunrise this morning but never made it to the end of the day.  So in everything we do give thanks for the life that is ours and if you are fortunate enough to have someone to share it with, well the...

New Year's Day~2020 I think I remember once as a kid growing up back in my hometown of Haven, Kansas that someone mentioned the year "2020".  At the tender age of 14, the notion of a year that far into the future seemed something akin to a distant galaxy in deep space.  You got the feeling that you'd never be able to see it and if you did , well then you'd be pretty much old.   I was wrong because I have now seen it and by the way, I'm not near as old as I predicted I would be.   Funny how the passage of time changes your perspective on things like that. 365 days lie ahead for all of us and how those days are spent will be up to each of us to decide.  One thing I have learned the hard way, as we all must do, is just how fast those days will fly by.  Young people, and I was once one, do not understand that concept yet for it takes the wisdom of age to realize the idea of the brevity of life.  I think of all the time I wasted and fritte...