Along the Road to Home

The 2020-2021 school year marks well more than 40 years for me as an educator in Kansas, Colorado, Texas, and now Oklahoma.  The world we find ourselves in is much different than it was for me in my first year of teaching back in my hometown of Haven, Kansas in the fall of 1979.  As much as things seem to change, I cling even stronger to the traditions that I mark each August.  This blogpost has been one of those "annual rituals" for the past 7 years.  I will share this story with my new class of 4th graders here in Newkirk, Oklahoma later on this morning when we gather in our classroom for the very first time.  Please dear friends, pray for all educators and their classes this year.  Now more than ever, we need you! ~a letter to the children~ Dear fourth graders, It's early in the morning as I write this message to you.  As a matter of fact, it's 4 a.m. so I imagine that you are all still sound asleep and perhaps even dreaming of the year that lies ah...

I came across a picture the other day that gave me some hope in this time of challenge that we are enduring in the world.  It was of a man and woman with their three little girls alongside them.  There were smiles on their faces as they stood among one another, more than likely on the Kansas prairie near the little town of Burrton. Take a look at them, shown below. ~Andrew and Catherine Brown with their three daughters~ My Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Rebecca are the big girls.  My mom is the little baby. This picture brings me a strange and unexpected amount of solace in these weeks and months of our time spent in the great pandemic of Covid 19.  The Brown Family had lived through the last great pandemic of the Spanish influenza.  Grandmother had been pregnant with my mother during its waning days of wreaking havoc upon the earth and to deliver her baby safe and sound in the early autumn of 1920 must have been such a relief to her.  Granddad's sister, my 58-year ...