Along the Road to Home

~along the Kansas-Oklahoma border at 2 a.m.~ It's the early morning hours here.   I mean the really early morning hours.   The clock on the wall reflects the fact that I have much on my mind.  While regular people are sound asleep at the 2:30 a.m. hour, I'm wide awake and already trying to tackle most of the day's problems from here at the desk in our kitchen.  I wish I could have slept but after 30 minutes of tossing and turning, there was just one option left. Get up. Yesterday marked the merciful end of a long and memorable (and not in a nice way either) week.  After being out of school for 3 days because of an October ice storm, we were at long last able to return. What a joy it was to finally see the kids once again, but our happiness was short lived when we found out at the end of the day we would go to a virtual setting the following week because of increasing Covid 19 concerns.  We hurriedly got our Halloween costumes on and enjoyed the special...

Come tomorrow morning, I will have made it to the ripe old age of 65.  I mistakenly was under the impression that my own mother was quite elderly when she was this age.  I confess that I was quite wrong.  She was actually very young still.  How could I have thought otherwise? Sorry about that Mom. As a teacher, I've been asked many times how old I am by well meaning students.  They were not being rude, rather they were simply curious.  I never once took offense at it, and it was the teacher in me that always told them the answer.  It was also the teacher in me that made them do a subtraction problem to figure it out first.     I have found most children to be extremely quick at taking numbers away from each other, especially when the difference they find will tell them just how old their teacher really is.   Tomorrow I will celebrate not only for myself, but for all the other folks out there who would have been glad to have mad...