More little snippets for your Sunday…
My kids have always loved hiking in the mountains, in the woods. I remember when they were little, Becca was fascinated by ferns. Whenever we passed a glade of ferns, she would stop us so that she could pet them. I couldn’t imagine anything cuter than a little three-year-old stopping her whole family in mid-hike to toddle over and gently, tenderly pet the green ferns in the dappled shade of the mountain forest.
I was fortunate that our family didn’t move around a whole lot when I was growing up. If I walked to the back of the high school went outside and through a little gate in the fence, I would be in the parking lot of the hospital where I was born. When I was born, we actually lived in a small village outside of town, but when I was too young to remember (before I was two years old, I think), we moved to the first house I remember living in. And we didn’t move until I was in grade 7.
That year, we moved within town. We didn’t need to change schools; in fact, we were now living next door to the elementary school I’d attended since junior kindergarten. This had good and bad points, but getting rid of the half-hour walk to school was good. This was also the house where I first had my own room (even though it was barely wide enough for the bed and a path to walk alongside it).
What I remember of this move was a lot of people helping. We had relatives and neighbours offering a hand…and even a priest I didn’t know yet. (I didn’t realise priests could be that young!) But it was only about a half-mile from one house to the other, so we had pick-up trucks and car trips. I don’t know, I may have even pedalled my own bicycle from one house to the other.
Then, my father got a new job, and during my last year of high school, he moved midway through the year, and we followed just a day or two after I finished high school. And I was about to experience living in a different town.
I was chatting with a friend the other day and all of a sudden, a couple of memories of a single year in school came back to me. It was the year I was in grade 3.
The first memory to come to mind was of discipline gone wrong. I remember my teacher in the middle of a lesson, and I remember somebody was disruptive. This teacher could do the disciplinarian if she had to, but that wasn’t the whole story. In this case, she figured that an effective way to get this student’s attention would be to whack her wooden pointer on the student’s desk. It certainly got everybody’s attention. There’s something about the end of the pointer breaking off and flying across the room which tends to do that! The whole class (the teacher included) had a good long laugh at that!
