| WALKING TO SCHOOL |
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| Today’s bussed students do not have the
opportunity to witness the beauty of nature as
we did in our daily walks to school. The birds, rabbits, crows, squir-
rels, calves, and colts were our daily companions on the walks to and from school. In the fall, we saw the leaves turn in beautiful colors and then the bare trees. There were pecan threes that always provided pecans to take home in our little round metal lunch pails. In the winter there was frost and ice on the ponds. In the spring, the wild flowers painted the hills. There were beau- tiful hills of Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brush bushes. Then came the time for wild dewberries which we picked and took home in our little lunch pails. |
| The walking route from our home to the
school was a lane by the fields and pastures and
then over a country road that crossed the Skull Creek. Walking over
that old wooden plank bridge
was an experience that was at first scary to
a beginner at school. To look down through the bridge board spacings and see the water hole below caused a little concern at first. Occasionally a moccasin would be gliding across the water. Then as I became bolder, I would look for the perch and minnows that were always plentiful. |
| When my brother and I (later my sister
and I) reached the country road in our walk to
school, we usually met other children from our neighborhood and we would
walk together, and by the time we got to school, we were quite a bunch.
We enjoyed walking with our
friends and chattered excitedly as children do.
If we were late, the teacher in his Model T Ford Roadster would pass us and we knew we had better hurry and not dilly-dally too long or we might be tardy. That resulted in a tardy mark on our report card. That was difficult to explain to our parents. |
| In the warm weather we walked barefoot,
carried our lunch pails, and put our books and
tablets in a cloth bag which we hung over our shoulders. In cold,
wet weather, our father would carry us in the buggy or take us on a horse. One boy, who lived quite a distance from school rode a donkey to school daily. He would tie the old donkey to a post in the horse barn during the day. The old donkey finally became tired of being tied to a post all day and decided he just wasn’t going to stand there all day. So in the mornings when the boy arrived on his donkey at the school ground the old donkey refused to enter the gate to the school grounds. At that point the boys who were playing ball nearby would all come to the boy’s rescue. They would get behind the old donkey with their baseball bats, and each time they wacked the old donkey he would take one more step. After this process was repeated a number of times, the donkey had made his way far enough forward so that the boy could tie him to a tree. And so the old donkey spent his day tied to a tree and not in the horse barn. |
| The dreaded report card days were known to the parents. The report cards showed not only student grades in each subject but also times absent, times tardy, and teacher comments as to attitude. If the grades were poor, the walk home was much slower. That old razor strap stung!! |
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