Hi. We cleaned the cemetery yesterday. My spouse is a schoolteacher, and she took her class from the school to the cemetery as an annual project they have created. She has created.
It's a pioneer cemetery, on a hill above the valley, in trees, looking exactly as a pioneer cemetery should. It's a quiet top of the world. A casual place. We have some beauties around here. Places that "should" be cemeteries.
They're seventh and eighth graders, or sixth and seventh, I forget. It is a great country school. The nearest town is, I dunno, twelve miles away.
I was tool man and hunter-gatherer and vice coordinator and vice-coordinator, and I get used a lot for shock value. "Exposure," you might call it.
They get exposed to somebody they normally wouldn't. Like cow pox.
Trust me. I'm usually a big hit.
Can't be stopped.
It was really kind of wonderful, the kind of wonderful that the whole while it was happening I was dreadfully aware of how different this might be from the rest of the world; the world over those hills there, off down in the valley, and comprising most of the places I've been most of my life, and being the places with most of the people in them.
This here Arcadia. This here, Olympus.
I doubt, but I'm not sure, that the kids are aware of this. Some, always become so.
They walk and run from the school across flowery fields and through trees and up hills and along a watery gully and on a dirt track and then a trail, for about a half mile away from the school. No cars come, the whole time we are there.
Wind in the trees is the only sound beside their appealing voices. Kid's voices outside classes and halls just don't sound as awful and cacaphonous as they do there.
I was also assigned photography, and problem solving, and animal protection, and teaching, and listening, and empathizing, and concealing my insanity.
Kids really dig it when you ask them questions.
Good questions.
So do I, man.
I really like it. |
