Attribution: Don O’Brien from Piketon, Ohio, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, accompanies the keeper as he walks the mile and a half to the country school.
Up Swans hill and past the fields where big-eared jackrabbits sometimes leaped from hiding and loped off like dancers.
Feeling the west wind in your face, sometimes with frigid kisses and other times with whispered messages of weather to come.
Down the big hill with the bicycle sand-trap at the bottom.
Through the low hollow where spring floods required Herman Shranz to piggyback us across the sudden torrent.
Ditches full of goldenrod and bouquets of blossoming weeds.
Peterson’s swamp with the resident muskrat population subject to youthful trap lines.
The flat half mile past the little Hope Church and the utility line with the electrocuted owl dangling in death.
Then the one room school, named after a politician—LaFollette, with country kids from six to fourteen, and a teacher challenged to find room in youthful brains that were already packed with fascinating trivia from having walked to school.
Photo by Bill Stokes