Along the Road to Home

~as life goes on~ It's been an eventful first full year of life in Newkirk, Oklahoma.  Things didn't seem to work out exactly as we had planned them to in many different ways, but for better or worse Mike and I are here to stay. I'll never forget that first day we were here trying to get our moving truck unpacked and things carted inside the house.  We knew absolutely no one, save for a couple of people we had met at the closing of the purchase of our house.  Mike and I were the new people in town, and it wouldn't take long for word to get out that we had arrived.  That first day of unloading, a steady stream of folks walked by and stopped to talk to us.  They introduced themselves and made us feel to home, like we were welcomed .  We must have had a dozen invites to church or Bible study that very first afternoon.  By the time that first day of life here was completed, both of us knew we had made the right decision to settle ourselves down into li...

My folks got married in the summer of 1940 when my father was only 17 and my mother was not that much older at 19.  They ran away to the courthouse in Wichita, Kansas during the early morning hours of July 31st with a signed permission slip from my Grandma Scott that gave consent for her underage son to marry.  They had little money between them after my father paid for their license, so at noontime upon legally becoming "husband and wife", they put their 15 cents into the soda pop machine and split a bottle of strawberry pop between them.  Then it was time to go back home and face the music, as both had to admit to her parents what they had done.   It all came out in the wash as they say. They were so young and in love. Oh, and one other thing.   They were so poor. My folks lived in an apartment above one of the stores on Main Street in Newton, Kansas for those first three years.  During that short span of time, their first two children ...

~Memorial Day weekend, 2020~ As a child growing up on the prairies of south central Kansas, I learned the practice of walking through cemeteries.  It was shown to me by my mother and grandmother, two women who throughout their lives extolled the virtue of honoring the dead who have gone on before us.  From the earliest of times when my mom would hold my hand as we made our way amongst the rows of graves until now when I am an aging woman myself, I have found peace and joy in visiting the graveyards of the dead.  Walking through that sacred and holy ground is a blessing that I do not take for granted. Not everyone feels that way about being in a cemetery and that's ok. I do. I was raised up in a family that called this special weekend Decoration Day .  Every single year without fail, my mom and her two sisters plus my Grandmother Brown would load up tin cans filled with blooms from the garden and take them to the family plots in the Halstead city cemetery as w...

Little by little, I have begun the process of settling into these early days of retirement.  Daily I go to the mailbox and always manage to find an assortment of correspondence from people who seem to know that I have almost attained that magical age of 65.  On a regular basis I find things from Medicare and all the supplements that go with it, advertisements for dental/vision coverage, and even occasionally from some one who wants me to be sure that my final arrangements   are taken care of before I die, not afterwards. Little do they know, I'm already six steps ahead of them on that one.  My cremation plan was paid for 13 years ago.   My final resting stop, next to my sweet sister Sherry, is a place I visit as often as I can each time I go back home to Reno County.  All that my children need to do is to arrange for someone to put my cremains into my side of our neighborhood and etch my date of departure underneath my name on the stone. ...

I can tell that I will have a little trouble being still .   The last day of continuous learning from home  was just a week ago yesterday.  My room is totally cleaned out and my keys are turned in.  The only thing that remains is to drop by the district office on Monday morning to turn in a few things that are left in my possession.  The final tangible things that identified me as a public school employee for this infamous 2019-2020 school year will be surrendered up and when I drive away, it's about as complete as it can be. As I move forward, it is sometimes with a restless feeling and one that others have told me should be considered quite normal.  I imagine that is very true.  The current state of affairs in a very unhealthy world coupled with the cessation of a vocation that has been mine for a gazillion years, can be quite a mix when thrown both together into the pot for supper. More than likely I will figure out this thing called reti...

~Monday morning~ How strange it seems to find myself at the beginning of a brand new week with only a few things left to do in my lifelong career as an educator.  I have some meetings to attend online, paperwork to look over and finish up, and then to do a final check out with my district.  After this is through, then I will officially be retired.  I have absolutely no idea about what lies ahead for me in the future and no inkling at all as to where I am headed.  Yet one thing I definitely know to be true. God is certainly not finished with me here on earth just yet. I promised myself that I would take the next 8 weeks to simply just stop  and try to enjoy the beauty of each day as it arrived.  It will be my intent to catch up on things around home that have often gone neglected with the busyness that always came with being a teacher.  I'm building my own "to do" list each day of not only things I need to do but also of things I want to do, a lu...

It took my mom an awful long time to get rid of my dad's things after he passed away two weeks before Christmas Day in 1982.  His clothing hung neatly in the closet for many months and as time went by, the dust began to settle upon his shirts and trousers.  Finally one day I said to her that maybe it was time to get rid of them, to clean out the closet and start over.  I figured she would be upset with me, but that was not the case.  Little by little she began to remove them until finally one day I went over and found everything bagged up in black garbage bags ready to be taken out.   My mom loved my dad very much and she sorely missed him when he was gone.  Holding on to the things that once were his allowed her to have a physical reminder of the man who was the father of her 7 children and her loving husband for 42 years.   After his death, my mom lived another 25 years on her own.  She continued to grow as a person and evolved int...

After 40 years of being an educator, the last 5 days of school in my teaching career have come to pass.   This Friday, May 8th is our last day of school, albeit done in a manner of continuous learning from home.  I did the calculations just now and if I did my figuring correctly, that's slightly more than 7,000 days in the classroom.  It's been more than enough time to make plenty of memories and to have learned a plethora of lessons in life. You know, I got into the business of teaching to make a difference in the lives of the children and families that I met.  That's our purpose as educators, to always be there.  Being there doesn't necessarily mean only when it is convenient for us, but rather any time that we are needed by our students and their families. I would like to think that I have made a difference somewhere along the line and I suppose that time will tell if truly that was the case.  Now that it is close to being over, I have to ask t...