It was Monday, Labor Day. Tomorrow was to be a big day for me. I was starting school. I had been looking forward to this for a long time. I didn’t know anything about school but I did think of it as a new adventure. All this summer my older brother had been telling me how bad it was and how much I’d hate it while mom kept reassuring me, telling me how much fun it would be and how much I’d like it.

After supper, Mom brought in the big washtub and placed it beside the kitchen stove, and started filling it with water. She put a couple of buckets of cold water in the tub then refilled and set them on the cook stove to heat. I couldn’t help but ponder about this while doing my evening chores which today consisted of gathering eggs from the hen house and filling the wood box, my brother meanwhile fed the chickens and pigs. We had developed a habit of arguing about who had the most work to do so Dad made us swap these particular chores every other day.  I tried very hard to ignore that tub which wasn’t easy when carrying firewood past it to fill the wood box. I had just deposited the last armful and was headed out the door when Mom stopped me and said she needed to trim my hair.

By this time going to school was beginning to lose a lot of its appeal and by bedtime, after a haircut, a bath, and trying on some new clothes, that mom had ordered for me from the Alden’s mail-order company,  I was beginning to understand the not liking part.

That night, I lay in bed beside my older brother and listened to him repeat how bad school was going to be and how much I would hate it until I dozed off.

This was it, for better or worse I was going to school today but first we had our morning chores to do which we did while mom fixed breakfast and packed us a lunch. The morning chores were a repeat of the evening chores with the addition of milking and feeding the cow and feeding the horse. The horse and cow were turned out in the pasture for the day and could go to water themselves. We did the milking in the mornings while Dad was at work and he usually did it in the evening.

After the chores, we washed our hands and faces, combed our hair, and put on our new school clothes while Mom put breakfast on the table, this morning a bowl of hot oatmeal and homemade biscuits with cow butter.

Things were different in those days. Mom made us wait while she straightened our shirt collars, checked our hands and ears, to make sure we had them clean, and that we had combed our hair, all the while telling us to hurry or we’d be late.

It was quite a walk to the schoolhouse, which was located in town at the foot of the mountain, about two miles down a crooked dirt road from where we lived.

The schoolhouse itself was a small white wooden building sitting just above the road and consisted of a small front porch

with the door opening into a short entrance hall and three classrooms. Each room had a small coat room where on one end there were hooks to hang your coat on and at the other end was a shelf to put your lunch bag and whatever else you might have brought with you. On the classroom side of this wall was a large blackboard and in front of it was the teacher’s desk. At the side of the room next to her desk was a small table with a water cooler and above that a shelf where you could keep your drinking cup. The student’s desks were lined up in rows facing the teacher’s desk.

Two grades were taught in each classroom by the same teacher.

The building was heated in winter by a coal furnace underneath the building in a small dugout basement and the amount of heat, which entered the classrooms through vents cut into the floor, was controlled by the size of the fire.

There was a small playground beside the schoolhouse with a coal house to store coal and kindling for the furnace at one end. A well with a hand pump sat beside it, where all the schools’ water came from.

And there were two paths, a girl’s path, and a boy’s path. These led up to the convenience houses. One thing I never understood, there was a large brier patch between the paths and nobody ever cut them down.