Growing Up Country!

I enjoy watching The Waltons on TV. It reminds me of my youth, growing up in a white, two-story house, surrounded by pastures, ponds, animals, and kids. However, we were not blessed with live-in grandparents or indoor plumbing. 

Even our old, stone schoolhouse lacked indoor bathrooms for several years. There was a water fountain and a sink for washing hands just inside the entrance. Grade school was on first floor. High school on second. Some classrooms combined two grades in one room with one teacher. And I think maybe we learned even better that way. 

Graduating with a class of only eighteen students, there was no one in high school I didn’t know. I played basketball, studied hard, and sang in chorus and quartets. We had fun class trips to the Tulsa State Fair every year, as well as trips to Springlake Amusement Park in OKC and Lake Texoma during our sophomore and junior years. Then the day after graduation, we seniors headed to Rockaway Beach, Missouri, for an exciting class trip! 

And like the Waltons, we had a grocery store for necessities, along with a glass candy counter and a gas pump outside. The church was just up the road a ways, where I saw the same friends that I went to school with for twelve years, many of whom are still friends today. 

Our teachers were part of the community. Some lived in small cottages near the school and attended our ballgames, pie suppers, and other activities. Even the storm cellar on the school grounds sometimes seemed like a social event, with several families gathering during tornado season. 

I felt blessed growing up in that little farming village where everyone knew each other, and help was just a neighbor away. Sometimes my memories take me down those old country roads, with wild roses and morning glories blooming on barbed-wire fences and sunflowers dotting the landscape. 

Then suddenly, I want to grab a bottle of pop from a chest of ice-cold water and hear the slamming of the screen door to that little county store in a place my memories still call home.