"REVERIES" REMEMBERED

By Ruth Higbee

In The Main Stem, Lead Belt News, 8/20/81, there is the heading "An Old Friend" about the passing of Mrs. Edna (Green) Foley. For me; the heading could have been "Old Family Friend."

I have known the Green Family all my life, for the Green farm and ours were "side by side" with Wolf Creek running between them - east of Farmington. The column of "Reveries" in the LBN, written by Edna, brought back live memories to me, for I went to the one-room Valley Forge School where Mrs. Jessie Huff, Edna's sister, was my teacher. And, I might add, a teacher who was tops.

What a privilege to have a good teacher and to attend what amounts to a private school in a setting of beautiful trees and surrounding meadows - where open school windows let in the song of birds and the tinkle of cow bells - and the sound of flies and bees with their friendly drone in the silent hours of book learning.

This was a day when a school room was quiet, except for times of reciting. Occasionally a woodpecker would disturb the silence with his loud knock outside on a corner of the school house. Then, all twelve (or fourteen) pupils of the school room would look around at each other and grin. Grinning, in this case, was legitimate - until the teacher appointed someone (usually a boy) to go outside and shoo the woodpecker away. As I say, we didn't sit around and grin at each other (or anything!) very much. This was a day when studying was the chief purpose of school. Schools cost a lot of money, we were told, as well as clothes and shoes, and by golly, we had better make the most of it, and learn. The only horsin' around, as I remember, was at the pump, where some of the older boys threw water on each other at recess or lunch time. But when the bell rang they settled down real quick like. Playtime was outside. Study time was inside.

At the end of each day Miss Jessie got out her little note book and asked the question "Who whispered today?" And she always added, "I want the truth." A few hands would go up, and the question followed, "How many times?" A timid "two times" or "three times" would be uttered and this many marks were jotted down after the guilty person's name. At the end of the school year, I don't know what happened to Miss Jessie's book, but I always imagined that it (somehow) made its way up to heaven, where those marks were permanently recorded after a person's name.

With small classes (grades one to eight) there was a lot of individual attention given to each pupil. With the teacher seated, and a child on each side - one couldn't help learning phonics. Too, phonic sounds were shown over and over on big cards, and if a kid didn't learn it in the first grade, he pretty well caught it by the end of third grade, just by sheer repetition, sitting and listening.

A "program time" was one of great expectations - a time when a wire was strung up and a sheet pinned on it for a curtain. We weren't exactly the Rockettes of New York's Radio City Music Hall - but the excitement was the same. Many hours and days were spent memorizing one's "piece", saying it loud and clear, with exactly the right emphasis on the right word. One was a star, for a few minutes at least, out in front of that sheet.

The Green family had a trash dump near the banks of Wolf Creek. Items from this dump played an important role in summer vacation days when many happy hours were spent on the creek bank with neighbor children. We salvaged broken dishes from this dump, which served to make an elegant table setting on a log in the sand - the scene of tea parties, where high-falutin conversation took place while wearing high heeled shoes (from the dump) and a hat made of mulberry leaves, put together with thorns. The little finger of the hand was stretched far out as we sipped pure air "tea" from a broken piece of glass - preferably blue, or something equally colorful.

Edna's writing was about an era -- an era when people did things for themselves. They butchered hogs, rendered lard, made soap, boiled clothes, made apple butter - all in the same iron kettle with its fire underneath ... A bladder from a butchered pig made a wonderful balloon, blown up, tied and tossed around in the air like a volley ball amongst kids. Recreation was created out of (almost) nothing.

Yes, those were the days when people did things for themselves and they felt good about it. And it's the spirit of these days that Edna Foley wrote about. She caused us to remember - and to feel good.

Published by THE LEAD BELT NEWS, Flat River, St. Francois Co. MO, Thurs. September 3, 1981.