by Raymond Alexander Kukkee

Created on: August 26, 2010

School: Paths Cast in Time

 The red brick schoolhouse rests with dignity,  overseeing the neighborhood with an elegance often displayed by elderly folk as they sit silently, perhaps rocking slowly on a  front porch on any  early autumn  morning.   A private home now, it was a public grade school for 60 years, a simple, functional building with one classroom for school days, a cloakroom at the back for woolen coats and mittens, a tiny library for precious books, and a teacher’s room for rest .

In the schoolyard, bushes are covered with sparkling dewdrops, and mature, noble trees lean precociously, coddling the old building and its secrets.  The happy echoes of laughing public-school children out in the playground  have long disappeared into  the bright  sunshine with past  school days, but the building itself pretends to be timeless.   The red clay brick is unchanged, and the tall,  multi-pane  windows reflect the early morning sunlight  brilliantly,  just as they did decades before.

The long piles of white-barked birch firewood,  logs cut into two foot lengths, split and always piled carefully along the fence have disappeared, just forgotten trees consumed in time by the maw of a huge wood-burning furnace deep in the heart of the central basement.   A morning breeze playfully  nudges small wisps of smoke from the red brick chimney, as if to prove another school day is about to begin.

Out in the playground, time seems to have disobeyed its obligation to march  ever onward except for the fact there are no happy children, and the path around the building has disappeared completely  under lush  grass . The path.   How can a path so worn into the mind, and  used so readily by hundreds of children for decades  just disappear?  The path changed everything.

It is easy to recall, but disconcerting to remember  the look of dismay, anger, and cold  fear  on the face of the  gentle woman looking down at the boy.  At the blackboard she taught  thirty students ranging from Grade I to Grade VIII in the one-roomed school, but it was recess time. She was urgently called away from her desk, and it  was to be  far from an ordinary school day,  far from a normal recess that might have had laughing children playing baseball, skipping ropes and  playing

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