“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
— Unknown
One day which sets apart from all the others in memories is opening day of a new school year. The calendar for children doesn’t run January through December, but begins when school doors open in late summer.
The freedom of summer has closed for the children I love most, and as I show only excitement for them, I feel a little melancholy as we lose those wide open days of sweet summertime with them.
My older sisters helped prepare me for that first big day, and Dad asked my second-oldest sister to watch over me the very first year. I still remember this, and how sweetly she took me under her wing, from the bus to the classroom.
For us, there wasn’t a great deal of back-to-school shopping. My school clothes had been waiting for me in the hand-me-down box, and I was excited to claim each one of those dresses as my own.
School meant dresses for all girls, with not a single thought otherwise. My mother spent a great deal of her time ironing one dress after another. The minute we got off the bus at the end of the day, we changed out of our school clothes and put on our play clothes. That, too, was simply accepted. This unspoken rule helped to keep our small school wardrobe nice and resulted in hand-me-downs that still looked acceptable.
As we got older, we had play clothes and chore clothes, but our choices were few. Shoes were limited, too, but that was one thing we shopped for each year.
“Put your feet on this machine,” I remember being told at a local shoe store. It decided for us just what size was right for us. It buzzed us with radiation, but not a thought was given to this new-fangled device.
This year, two of our grandchildren start kindergarten, on their way to making memories of their own. Let them be happy ones, as their world expands and the desire for learning is like a spark never extinguished.
