Back to School
A snow day at Lewisville Elementary School in Lewisville, North Carolina.
School Day Memories
Last week on the morning after the light snowfall in Lewisville, I headed to Lewisville Elementary School, hoping for a good shot of my very first alma mater.
As I recalled some of my childhood experiences at the school, I decided to share some of those memories with you. Maybe they’ll trigger some school day memories of your own. If so, consider sharing them in the Comments section at the end of this post.
Please continue to the NEXT SECTION to read 10 distinct memories I have as a student at Lewisville Elementary School…several “light years” ago. CLICK to read the school day memories
More Than a Flag
This flag is tacked to the side of the barn that was recently featured in the Bygone Days post. It’s a fairly simple scene. Yet, for me, on this Election Day, it’s about more than a flag. It’s about the privilege and the freedom to elect those whom we charge to lead and represent us.
Bygone Days
Scenes such as this make me think of a time when the family farm was a common sight. In days gone by, the livelihood of family farmers depended on the manual labor of the entire family — adults and children alike.
Families worked together on their farms to cultivate and harvest any number of crops, or to raise and care for livestock and other farm animals. Their work days were typically long, and their duties often required them to work extensively in the extreme heat or cold.
Although I never worked on a farm myself, I grew up around farmers. My grandfather’s flour and feed mill was the destination of farmers who either sold their grain to the mill or had their grain ground into feed for their animals.
As a child, one of my distinct memories regarding farmers at the mill is of my brother and me helping farmers’ children shovel grain from their truck beds into the grain pit at the edge of the mill’s porch through which grain was carried to a storage bin inside the mill.
Jumping into the back of those large grain trucks offered a way to have fun, and I still recall the exhilaration of my bare feet sinking down, down into the sea of grain.
The best part of shoveling the grain into the pit was when the bed of a truck that had a hydraulic lift was slowly raised. That’s when the remaining grain would start rapidly falling into the grain pit — and we’d hang on for dear life as the truck bed reached its peak! It was simple, clean fun. Well, actually it wasn’t exactly clean, because we could be pretty dusty by the end of the day!
From such childhood experiences at the mill, I developed a lasting affinity for farmers and their families. They were authentic and unpretentious. They were hard-working and fun-loving.
With the demise of many family farms, I lament the passing of a way of life that has embodied the very best of human qualities and vocations.
Yesterday’s Ride
I drive by this rusty old car just about every day and have never really thought much about it. When I realized it was a Cadillac, I was kind of stunned. Stunned because it seems too ugly to be a Cadillac! It’s like an “alien” compared to today’s Cadillacs. (Those headlights do look a bit weird, don’t they?!)
But just think, someone actually designed that Cadillac, down to the smallest details, intentionally determining the spacing, proportions and shapes that made it that year’s model. Then thousands of people who liked how the car looked bought it and drove it home, probably with great pride and joy!
Yet with the passing of time, this particular Cadillac — whose owner presumably had once thought it to be attractive — now sits rusting away at the edge of a field.
Of course, most everything does eventually rust or decompose. And many of the products we once favored, in time, become candidates either for Good Will or the landfill.
What changes? Is it us, or the things we possess? Or perhaps both?
It has been written in an ageless book that the things that are seen are temporary, and the things that are not seen are eternal. When I think of the many things I’ve owned over the years, it does make me pause and consider what’s really important — and what’s not.
MORE TO COME! Check out the interesting follow-up article to this post, titled Something Old, Something New.
