Good morning Panther Nation!
As we wrap up the last week of the normal school week and consequently the COVID-19 school week, things are certainly different. What is not different is our staff and students’ quest for excellence. From the senior parade Sunday to the PK graduation that was supposed to happen tonight, things are just not the way they are supposed to be. Our preschoolers will likely not remember what they missed, but our seniors will. I hope this makes them stronger for living through the COVID-19 ugly times. There will likely be tougher times in each of our lives, but they will be individual wars that we fight, hopefully not global pandemic wars that we are experiencing now. I truly think that each of us will be stronger and these times will increase our grit. As the sign to start this blog mentioned "your dreams are on the other side of your grit", we all look forward to the other side of life without this virus.
Speaking of grit, when I was in sixth grade we had thirty head of cow/calf pairs. It was January of 1979. Crazy snow was falling and we kept expecting to have school cancelled, I’m not sure why because we never missed school because of snow. Anyway, the snow kept falling and then it would get warm during the day. The snow would melt, then snow again. The snow pack was solid ice, more snow, more melt eventually the farm was a glacier! School was finally cancelled! Hooray, a snow day! My dad woke me up at five am. I am thinking, seriously…dad. Anyway, he said “you don’t have school so get up and go check the cows. You see, our small herd was scheduled to calve in January. I absolutely don’t do that now because of my history of horrible times of calving season back in the day! I believe late February, early March make (most times) better weather for baby calves to be born. Anywho, I got up, he left for his engineer job, my mom was already at work. She owned a restaurant and was always gone by 4:30 am. I got the chore buckets ready and headed out to the feed bunks. Four wheelers didn’t exist back then, it was all on foot! I yelled for the cows… nothing. I couldn’t see any cows, calves --- nothing. I walked back to the house, went in and called my dad’s office. He said “just find them and feed them.” That seemed simple enough, however; I couldn’t find them, they were gone. I walked south with a quarter bucket of ground corn (their favorite) and hollered for them. Nothing, I got to the south fence and found tracks. You see we had so much snow and melt and more snow and melt and more snow that it had built up so much that the tracks led to them seriously walking over the fence! I found them a half mile past our fence line. Luckily the cows were tame enough, knew me enough and certainly knew that yellow bucket that they followed me all the way back. Fortunately, we had a high fence lot on the south side of the barn that was not built up with ice and snow. I coaxed them in where they stayed until the snow/ice above the fences melted during the next week. The grit in this story was not me, it was my dad. I was not happy at all about not getting to “sleep in” on one of the few snow days in my early educational career. He was the one with grit and determined to make sure that his kids weren’t going to grow up lazy!
Stay healthy!