Photo by Phyllis Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, on this snowy, cold January morning, joins the keeper and Phyllis in watching the flow of students headed to a variety of schools over along Gammon Road.
They come in buses, cars, vans, slogging across the parking lot with big backpacks and one will likely be riding a bicycle.
It is a sight as reassuring as a sunrise and, of course it triggers memories: Phyllis riding a horse with her younger brother Arlie to the barn at a Canadian one room school, the keeper facing the wind over the mile and a half of hills in northern Wisconsin and checking his trapline along the way.
Last fall, son Mike and granddaughter Sarah took Phyllis and the keeper on a wonderful trip to revisit the keeper’s childhood haunts, among them the route he had traveled to get to the one-room country school. It was an emotional outing and never more so than when the keeper proved that when he talked about walking a mile and a half into the cold west wind, uphill both ways to get to school he had been telling the truth.
No trace of the school remains, which would likely be the case with Phyllis’s school’s horse barn.
But there are those wonderful memories triggered every morning when the students come flooding into the Gammon Road school complex.
