Going back to School

Going Back To School
At the age of 46, I have the opportunity to go back to school. Isn't that something! Things sure are different.
I grew up in the hills of Kentucky with a mom and dad that never finished elementary school. Their school system was a little one-room school, sitting back in the hills.
My first years in school were also in a one-room school. The first four grades were in a little one room building called Cove Branch School with the bathroom outside in it’s own little building. There was no running water in the school or in the bathroom. When I graduated to the fifth grade at Johnetta I got to move up to the older student,s school. This school was so different. It had all the kids from the fifth grade to the eight grade. There were maybe twenty kids in the school. Here the students had to keep up the school. The older girls had to do the cooking for all the students and the teacher. It was up to us what we had for lunch each day. We would have to open big gallon cans of green beans, corn, peaches, meat or whatever we had at the time. Sometimes I wondered exactly what kind of meat was in that five pound can. The best day to cook was when we decided to cook vegetable soup, you got to open all those cans and just dump it in a kettle and sit and wait for lunchtime. The washing of all the dishes was the worst because the older girls always made the younger ones do the washing up. I didn’t like it when I was in the fifth, but in the seventh I liked that a lot.
The boys had to go to the spring to get the water in a bucket. The first year I was there, though, that got changed. The teacher always sent two boys to pack the full bucket back to school. Sometimes, the boys just wouldn’t come back to school. The teacher then decided that it would be best if a girl went with a boy. As you can imagine, sometimes that caused the bucket of water to have a slow trip back to the schoolroom. We all drank from the same bucket with the same dipper. Who knew anything about germs? This is the same thing we did at our homes.
When I became an eighth grader, they consolidated the school system in the county. We were all going to Mt. Vernon Elementary School. It was wonderful and awful at the same time. We had running water, food sat in front of us with supplies if we needed them, which was all great. But we lost the togetherness and friendship we all had for each other.
By Vickie Miller