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We have tiny closets in our house which naturally limits wardrobes. Because of this, I do a seasonal switch-over twice a year between warm-weather and coolweather clothes. The off-season goes into storage somewhere on the ranch. I was getting out the cool season clothes, finally, now that it’s been quite cool for a couple of weeks, and was digging for tights and leggings so that I can continue to wear my beloved skirts and dresses during the winter. This led me to remembering walking to school in the winter with my little twirly dresses and how cold my legs would get. Back in those days, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school unless the temperatures were below freezing, which rarely happened in coastal South Carolina. This led to me realizing just how long ago that was and how much things have changed.
We get up every day and go about life then go to bed and sleep at night then get up and repeat. Unless there is something that draws our attention to it, we seem oblivious to the passage of time. This morning I was wondering how long ago any public school had a dress code that No Wonder
said girls may only wear dresses. That time slips on by whether you are paying attention or not.
Next I started thinking about how when I first moved to Texas, every public school I was around had Chicken Fried Steak day once a week in the cafeteria with real deep-fried steaks and cream gravy. In the school where I did student teaching, it was Wednesdays, and EVERYONE ate school lunch that day. My husband and I talk a lot about our lives growing up, including our school lunches. My husband had a Planet of the Apes metal lunchbox with a thermos, and I had one with Roy Rogers (I had lots of things with Roy Rogers on them). We both remember lots of bologna and American cheese sandwiches, fold-over baggies of chips, sometimes carrot or celery sticks (no Ranch for dipping as Ranch had not been invented yet), the occasional cookie, and the occasional tiny box of raisins. The thermos usually held Kool-Aid, the kind where you added your own sugar, or in cold weather I would sometimes get hot chocolate. These were glasslined thermoses, so carbonated soda was a no-no—I remember the time one mom forgot that and the kid poured out Coke with little shards of mirrored glass in it. The cap doubled as a cup with a little handle on the side, and that is what you drank out of, by the way. Once in a great while I would find soup in my thermos—something like alphabet soup, usually.
As I sit here and think about how drastically different things are now for elementary students, my brain kind of naturally drifts to “no wonder” when I think of the problems and complications we have these days. I certainly do not look back on an ideal world when I was a kid, because there were horrible things going on in the world around me and in my little world, but it seems there was more effort made to let children be children until it was time to start taking on adult concerns. There were more intact families and a kind woman like my second grade teacher could pull a child’s loose tooth, then hug them tight while they waited for the bleeding to stop. No wonder. <SpringCreekArtsGuild@gmail. com>