THREE-GENERATION ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

While cleaning out Mom and Dad’s house, we decided it was time to get rid of this. Burnell, my dad, made it out of a brick from the one-room school house he attended. He, his father, Carter, and his grandfather, Reuben, all attended this little school known as the “White School” of district #7 of the Elkport Township in Clayton County, Iowa. When the school was torn down, Dad took actual boards from the siding and a nail from it and put together this commemorative brick. That’s him pictured in front of the school (above).

I remember my grandma taking us mushroom hunting near the school when we were young. It was abandoned with windows broken out and so it looked rather foreboding. But Dad didn’t seem to be bothered by that. He would always proudly tell us that it was his country school when he was a boy. 

Why is it that kids have a hard time picturing their parents as children? My dad—a little boy? It was a weird concept to me. And the idea that he went to school in the dark ages in this humble little, one-room school with no indoor plumbing really blew my mind. I guess it made his childhood seem even more fictional to me.

Now as an adult, I still have a hard time thinking of him as a boy. But as I look at the picture I took of him holding the brick, I guess I can see the boyish twinkle in his eye. To him it seems only yesterday that he was a kid causing trouble at that quaint country school.

My dad (front) with his little brother and mom

Dad's baby picture

My grandpa as a boy

Three generations of Smith men went to school there. That’s a long way back. My grandfather, a little boy studying there—and his father before that. I never got to meet these men and I’m curious to know what they were like, especially when they were young students at school. What was their world like in the hills of Clayton County in those days? What did they hope for their future? 

Suddenly, I feel a surge of emotion. Though I didn’t even meet two of the three Smiths who went to this school, they a part of me. They are my ancestors. Now I am overwhelmed with a profound sense of gratitude for them, and for the life and values they gave to me. 

Though this one-room school house is long gone and the teachers and many of the students have died, I am now certain that its impact can still be felt.

MY OWN WILL TO BE WELL

When we were cleaning out our house for sale, we found all kinds of notecards Mom had written. She was splendiforously organized. I have trouble keeping my own schedule straight and I could never do it without Google Calendar, but Mom was amazing. She kept four of us organized and that was before the days of computers. Her secret? 3x5 notecards. 

Here’s a notecard she made identifying my allergies. Stapled to it is the handwritten note from our allergist, Dr. Kooistra in Madison, which includes the same list. She’d rewritten it, just for good measure. That’s how organized she was.

As I look over the list, I’m catapulted back to my allergy days. Most everything made me sniffle and sneeze and break out in a big, itchy rash. Playing hide-and-go-seek was a nightmare for me. I’d emerge from the shrubbery in which I’d been hiding, covered in red welts. “It’s nothing,” I’d casually say to the neighbor kids and then when they weren’t looking I’d scratch my legs until they bled.

I recall the first time they took us to Dr. Kooistra for allergy testing. They injected our backs with all the possible allergens. My sister, Kathy, came out pretty much allergy-free but I was diagnosed with the entire list you see on Mom’s 3x5 and boy, did my back itch! The only things that didn’t illicit an allergic response from me were “cat” and “dog.” Mom and Dad wouldn’t let us have indoor pets so what good was that, anyway?

The entire natural world messed me up. Grass, trees, pollen—why would my body react against these and other organic things? Why wouldn’t they heal me and connect me to the earth? It was like my body was rebelling against the whole planet. 

I would perform award-winning sneezes every time I’d step outside. My poor nose was so overworked that it would bleed routinely. I got to be only too proficient at stuffing Kleenex up my nostrils and waiting patiently for the bleeding to stop. By the way, this is is not a good way to be cool when you’re a kid.

The allergies caused asthma and there were a few times when it got so bad, I had to be taken to the emergency room to be put on oxygen. Imagine running around the block at top speed and then putting a wet towel on your head and trying to catch your breath through it. That’s how I remember an asthma attack feeling. There’s nothing more terrifying than not being able to breathe.

So we beseiged my problem head-on. In addition to taking allergy meds, I had to made drastic life changes. Dust, the doctor told us, is in stuffed animals. No! Not my stuffed animals! This was the most tragic loss of all. Mom was nice enough to let me keep them but we had to wash every lovable stuffed critter, then cram it into a big plastic bag, which was kept downstairs in the toy room. Each week, just two of my  pho fur friends got to hang out with me while the rest waited their turn in the lonely,  suffocating bag. On Sunday, I’d take the two down and switch them out for another two. They were dreadfully sad to be put away. Their penetrating glances seared through the clear plastic and I’d have to avert my eyes to diminish the pangs of guilt.

If it weren’t for Mom’s notecard, however, I don’t think I’d even remember all the things I used to be allergic to.  Aside from the occasional spring sneeze, I’m allergy-free now. Why? Well, I did I endure four years of allergy shots. They also say you can outgrow and outrun your allergies.  I think I did both as I lived in a number of different climates for a decade after college.

As the laughter yoga professional I am today, I can also assert that mind-body medicine is powerful. Our thoughts affect our bodies. Therefore, I’d like to believe that my own will to be well has helped my allergies fade away. In particular, I’ve sought to make peace with the earth instead of reacting against it as I once did. Indeed, all that time climbing trees and making friends with them really paid off!

THE BUNNY WITH THE FUNNY NOSE

“Why did I give the bunny a Muppet nose?” I said with a giggle as I picked up this fine sculptural piece from my collection of early works.

I created it for an art class assignment at Northside Elementary School in Monroe, Wisconsin where my dad was the superintendent of schools. Art was always my best subject. I could outshine most of my peers in this class. They didn’t use the A-B-C grading system for lower elementary. I remember they had SP for “Strong Progress,” which was the equivalent of a B—and E for “Excellent,” the A of the little kid world. I loved Es and I got them in art every time.

However, as I studied the work before me, I wondered why any art teacher would give it an E. How young was I, anyway? I opened the rabbit’s dramatically exaggerated tail and pulled out some of the newspaper stuffing to try to find a date. Thursday, December 6, 1979. I must have been in fourth grade. I've been an art teacher. I know that fourth graders can do better than this.

So what does the bunny with the funny nose, created by my nine year-old self, have to tell me about my story? Hmm, this writing project is going to be more difficult than I thought. 

Well, for one I made excellent use of the media. It’s hard to get intense color out of Crayola on brown paper bag but I did it. Just look at those vibrant yellows! And the white on top of the darker paper almost has an Elvis-on-black-velvet effect. I am sure I got cramps coloring that hard.

Another thing I notice is the originality of the work. I mean, this guy not only has a pink button nose, and hauntingly huge eyes, he’s also smiling. The Holstein pattern of the dots is creative, too. This re-envisioned rodent is a one-of-a-kind find, that’s for sure.

Yet, I notice something else. I had punched holes all around half of it and begun to lace it up with thick yarn. Very nice. But then, it appears I got lazy and just stapled the rest of it closed. I’m willing to bet I procrastinated working on this and then had to grab ass at the last minute. Maybe I only got an E- on it. 

So why have I always been a procrastinator? Was it that being a superintendent’s kid made me feel the need to aim higher than my classmates and this touch of perfectionism caused it? Or was I just more into fun-having and made that the priority instead of my academic work? Since I loved art so much, though, why wouldn’t finishing the happy rabbit be fun enough? And that reminds me: where did my strong creative identity come from, anyway? Nobody else in my family was an artist. It always made me feel different.

In the end, this awkward art seems to raise more questions than it answers. One thing’s for sure, though: I’m a better artist now.

A REMNANT OF MY FORMER CERTAINTY

My mom saved just about everything I ever did—finger paintings, handwriting practice sheets, coloring pages, construction paper collages, even math worksheets. She carefully collected all my school papers and projects in a box each year. Then, during the summer, she’d seal up the box, label it and have Dad find a place for it somewhere in the basement of the house. When that was full, the attic at the cabin offered the additional space needed to house these treasures.

You are supposed to save your stuff. It’s important. It tells your unique story. And well, you never know, you might just want to look at it again someday. Right?

This was fine for a long time. Stowed away in my parents’ properties, these artifacts of my childhood didn’t bother me. Then, when I moved back to Iowa eleven years ago, Mom and Dad started showing up with these boxes. One by one they trickled in. My husband, William, and I tried to stop the onslaught but Mom left me no choice. She explained that she’d gone to the work to save them so I was obligated to deal with them. “You can throw these things away,” she conceded, “but you have to promise me you’ll look at every thing before you do.”

Before I even began to fulfill my promise to her, Mom died. Soon after, Dad cleaned out the house and sold it. In the process, he dumped lots more boxes in my basement.

Then one day, I was in the basement looking for something and I saw a box that had fallen out of the stack at the foot of the stairs. It was a cute little gray thing. What caught my eye is that it had my name written on it. Curious, I picked it up. One end had a label that read: Gay Nineties Candies.  I opened it up and was shocked to find the corner of my baby blanket, carefully packed with shredded newspaper. 

“Blanky!” I exclaimed, grabbed the piece of blanket and instinctively held it to my nose, just as I had done as a baby. 

What the hell was Blanky doing in my basement? It all started to come back to me. I’d loved that pale pink blanket until it was so raggedy Mom deemed it a trip hazard when I carried it and a choking danger when I slept with it. I didn’t care, though. I adored it. Somehow, she was diplomatic enough to convince me to let her trim off the worst parts. I have no idea how she managed this. Over time, she cut more and more off—not unlike the manner in which the Gingerbread Man got himself eaten by the fox. Eventually, there was nothing but a small, stained corner of the nylony edging. Then, Mom boxed Blanky up for me and hid it away. 

That blanket had given me years of unmitigated strength. I used to tuck it into my diapers and run around wearing it as a superhero cape. I’m not sure why I didn’t tie it around my neck like a normal superhero. I don’t know, but it still worked this way as you can see by the picture below. 

Yes, that's me—a little thumb-sucking, diaper-caped toddler sitting in the doll house my father made for my sister and me (an exact replica of the house in which we lived).

Like the security blankets of countless children around the world, Blanky was a friend and a physical symbol that I was safe—that the world couldn’t conquer me.

Now, in the dim basement, I held the remnant of my former certainty. It actually didn’t smell as bad as it looked. I remember it had smelled so good, particularly with my thumb tucked into my mouth under my blanketed nose. I sniffed it again. It it smelled like stale seventies. All the power had gone out of it.

Should I have had more of an emotional response to this rare find? I mean, it had waited decades for me and now I was dismissing it in a matter of minutes.

I summoned enthusiasm and ran upstairs with the box. “Look!” I told William, “I found the last bit of my baby blanket!” He glanced up from his computer with zero reaction. 

“Isn’t that interesting that my mom saved it for me?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.

I shrugged, placed it back in the time capsule box from which it had come and took it downstairs.

In the following weeks, I continued to think about that event and about all the stuff of my story. Why is it that we in the Western world place so much emphasis upon our physical possessions? Yes, our things can bring us joy, and so we think they’re important. Yet they only have the meaning that we give them and we are in great danger of being overrun by them. As the years pass, it is the story rather than the stuff that retains its value.

So in order to plumb the depths of my story, I’ve decided to embark upon a journey through my stuff. My goal is two-fold: to explore how these saved items help me remember and tell my stories and to clean my cluttered basement.  That’s because once I’ve written about my things, I intend to get rid of them. I do believe that this is the only process by which I can let them go and be free to move forward with my life story.

I invite you to tag along as I take on this project. May it inspire you to think differently about your own stuff and more importantly, your story. Please feel free to comment about how these writings affect you. I’d like for this to be a conversation.

Now, let the adventure begin!