The Schoolhouse Reunion: A Grandmother’s Reflection
A grandmother visits her granddaughter's rural school and finds herself transported back to her own youth, struggling to reconcile the modern fashions of schoolchildren with the enduring traditions of the classroom.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I went to my granddaughter’s schoolhouse, and I felt frustrated and wished I hadn’t come. But then I thought of Mariar, and she never should say I went home. I stood for a moment bewildered, and then I stepped up to a seat. The young ones in the schoolroom gaped when they heard the noise of my feet. There were young ones whose mothers had washed them that morning before they left home, and some who hadn't, and wouldn't until the millennial time. There was shirts and breeches that patches would help in a modest way, while the hair of some looked like rat-tails, not combed for many a day. I looked for the good old school days when we had no fashions new. The teacher, a nice little feller, rapped with his foot on the puncheon, and each eye was turned to a book. The teacher came down where I sat and gave me a book, all a-smilin’, and said, ‘Mrs. Brown, is it not nice?’ I told him it was, and I told him of Ezekiel Brown who had died, and that all I had was my children, and Mariar was my joy and pride. I forgot all about that morning, how I fit to teach her the right; but that’s some of schoolmaster’s business, so I didn't mind, by a sight. And I thought of the days when he was a boy of fourteen or ten, and I a girl of a nine-bow, we broke our road through the snow to the old schoolhouse at the corner, he carrying my dinner along.
“I looked for the good old school days when we had no fashions new. But the dresses! Good law, they was pookered, puffed, and pleated about.”
This piece, appearing in a March 1883 issue of the Post-Intelligencer, captures the perennial generational friction of the school system. Just as the narrator observes the 'new fashions' and 'rat-tails' of the children with a mixture of judgment and nostalgia, modern Seattle residents continue to grapple with the evolution of educational environments and the way past experiences color our view of current civic institutions.
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