Back to School
Lazy Days of Summer
Farm Life

Summer holidays! Yippy! How I use to long for those lazy days of summer, staying up late and watching old black and white movies and then sleeping until noon. I would spend the summer reading Nancy Drew mystery novels, suntanning using baby oil and driving my one speed bike over to my friends house for a dip in their field pond. But by mid August I was yearning to go back to school, hang out with my friends and get back into the swing of things. After all, a person can only sit around shucking peas for so long before they go a bit stir-crazy.

In August we would make the trip to the big city of Weyburn Sask. to purchase my ‘back to school’ supplies. I can’t remember if we had an actual list, but I would buy a number of Hilroy writing books, the one with the three holes in them that could easily fit into a binder. I usually got a new binder, nothing fancy, just big enough to fit my Hilroy books – one for each subject. A new pencil case and brand new pens and pencils were in order. Just the basics. There were no back packs, but if I was very lucky, I might even get a new book bag. I remember getting a nice leather attache case (like a professor would carry) which I looked after and loved for most of my high school years. We didn’t have computers, cell phones or even calculators. We had to use our brains. What a concept!

I would lay all these treasures out on my bed, and looking at them one by one, organizing them and thinking about what my year would be like. Each Hilroy book would be carefully marked with the subject name on the front cover. One by one I would repack them into my attache.

A few days before school started I would conspire with a girlfriend or two that who ever got to school first, would pick the perfect desk in the classroom and save the seat behind or in front of them for their friend. If you got to school too late, everything would be picked over and you would spend the year in a desk right at the front of the classroom, or (I shudder) at the back. Somewhere mid section would be perfect, preferably with a nice window view. In our small town country school, we had a home room where we ‘lived’ for the entire year. The teachers were the ones who moved about changing rooms as they taught.

What to wear on the first day of school? Not that we had plenty of cloths, remember we were farm kids, but you had to make a first good impression. And as my mother would say “you always went to school with clean cloths.”

Then the day finally came – the first day of school. Everyone would scramble to grab a desk, coming in all with their freshly polished face, brand new (often too short) hair cuts, squeaky new runners and freshly ironed cloths.

Then the school bell would ring and everyone quickly settled in for another year, as we went ‘back to school.’