Survivors

That whooshing sound you hear is me exhaling in a long sigh. It's over. The semester. I got home from school a little before dark--in time to feed the sheep and check the mail and lug everything in from the van--taffy cooking supplies, some delicious food treats, my book bag containing stacks of unchecked papers. But I'm going to bed tonight without setting an alarm for tomorrow. We have a two-week vacation ahead.

My comp students and I have been working madly to finish up the book we have dubbed Rural Roots: Life in the Pleasantview Area from 1920-1945. We stapled it together today and folded the booklets and are prepared to make them available on Sunday, Christmas Day. We're letting people take booklets without paying since it's on a Sunday. People should also sign their name and take an envelope for making their payment later. The booklet has over 50 pages.

We were disappointed with some of the glitches in the printing process. One of the pictures we had included was missing. Also, the page numbers . . . (Doing this is a nightmare in OpenOffice--just so you know.) moved around after I had repeatedly checked to see that they were NOT moved, resulting in some pages having text lines below the page number at the bottom of the page. ARRRRGGGHH. Christy's nicely done Table of Contents had a crooked lineup at the right margin after I inserted the numbers, and in the process of experimenting with correcting it, I seriously messed up the first page number entry. We're still gamely presenting the book, despite its flaws, but we did insert an apology for the glitches on the publicity signs.

Our long-reach stapler did not seem up to the task today when we were working together to get the stapling job done. We finally all stopped what we were doing and prayed about it together. Shortly thereafter Stephen and Brandon figured out that the long stapling arm was shifting slightly on the down stroke and causing staples to go awry instead of straight through the sheets as they were intended to do. After that, one strong young man immobilized the back end of the stapler arm while the other smashed those staples through where they were supposed to go.

You'll want to buy the booklet for the stories anyway--not for the chance to inspect the staples and the page numbers. And those stories are good! Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the titles: The Harness That Made History, A Badger Evens the Score, Tracks of a Forgotten Trail, Beef Rings--A Community Project, Forays Off the Farm, Highways and Byways From the Past, Memorable Tragic Happenings, A Peddler's Buggy.

In the section that deals with memories organized by topic, the titles are: Bookshelves and Bishops, China Dolls and Yellow Roses, CPS/FDR/WPA spells HOPE, The Diversity of Self-Sufficient Farms, Going Places, A Lively Labor-Filled Life, Peddlers and Shippers, Transporting Farm Products, Jackrabbits, and Dust.

All sorts of amazing connections emerged when we heard the stories, investigated further, and retold them. John Mast had a hilarious story about an ill-fated get-rich-quick plan he and his brothers hatched during the Depression. Read all about it in "A Badger Evens the Score." It involved employment on the farm of a man who turned out to be the father-in-law of my sixth grade teacher.

One little Headings boy who used to live at the Ed Conkling farm (1 1/4 mile south of our place) died during an illness he had at the same time my grandfather Levi was also very sick. Ed Nisly was the third little boy in the community who was visited by Dr. McCoy from Partridge on the same night. On his way home from these evening visits the doctor drove his horse and buggy in front of a train at the crossing on Herren Road and was killed. That happened before the time period targeted in our booklet, but we included it anyway in a section that dealt with health, home remedies, etc. The son of that doctor was an eye doctor whom some of my siblings had seen in Hutchinson when they needed their eyes checked. (My mom liked to take her children there as soon as she figured out that he was slower to prescribe glasses than most eye doctors.) He lived in the "Plantation House" on West Fourth at one time.

Vernon Yoder, who was so fast at ciphering that he usually had the answer as soon as he was finished writing the problem was the deceased husband of Marilyn, who Paul and Edith and I visited in Indiana after Susanna's dad's funeral. Vernon was Paul's older brother, and Marilyn was his sister-in-law.

I learned about the accidental shooting of Albert Helmuth, who was my grandmother's step brother. She was pregnant with my twin uncles at the time, and needed bed rest to avoid a miscarriage, the threat thought to have been triggered by the stress surrounding the accident. I heard about Amos Nisly's childhood sorrow upon hearing of the death of his dear friend and cousin, little Roman Nisly, who died in a lightening strike while he was taking a bath in a metal tub at the base of the windmill over the washhouse, and I thought of Shane when his friend Andrew died.

Over and over we heard about truly hard times. I thought of that today when I heard some of my typing students talking about the Christmas gifts they were giving or had gotten in the past. They weren't talking about a little candy and an orange . . .

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The taffy tradition at school would certainly be doomed if it never went better than it did today. The simple fact was that I was trying to do too many things at once and it got cooked too hard. Some of the minor ingredients that get added near the end of the cooking time didn't get added at all because the taffy was overdone as soon as typing class was over. I don't know how this happened. I had written in notes from previous years that in order to get the taffy done by dismissal time it should be started cooking at 12:30. We did that, but it got done far sooner than I expected. Since there was no one free to hover over it as it was cooking, the problem went undiscovered till it was too late.

While some were pulling taffy, some of the rest of us were still obssessing over getting the booklets stapled together, so I was not present to witness all the distresses with the project. Not a proud moment.

Next year we definitely need to have someone come in to help cook the taffy if we have a similar class schedule as this year.

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I would vote for dismissing school at noon without keeping on right up until Christmas weekend. I'd much rather return to school in the week following New Year's Day than having that whole week off and no time off before Christmas. At least, the high school and grade school ought to be able to get on the same page with dismissal time before vacation. As it was, four high school students had absconded before dismissal time today--one of them more than a week ago. The rigidity of the ACE privilege system based on a full five-day week is a powerful driving force for not trimming off any days or hours from a standard school week. What to do?

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Norma looked at me at the end of the day today and said, "We're survivors." Exactly. I'm sure the students feel the same way--the ones that worked extra hard, at least.