It’s amazing how the senses, especially smell, can bring back those memories of past experiences.

For example, for me the smell of cut rabbit brush or sagebrush triggers the start of school because that’s when vegetation that grew up over summer was cut away from the Morapos School, the teacherage where the teacher lived, and playground equipment.

It’s just one of many memories I have regarding my early school years. For example, my memories include …

• The “smell” of new textbooks and tablets.

• Wearing new school clothes and breaking in new shoes. 

• New crayons, pencils and a tablet just waiting to be used.

• Lunchbox foods including sandwiches made with a potted meat mix and “boughten” bread, fruit and “boughten” cookies (such as the chocolate, marshmallow or coconut cookies of my sister Charlotte’s memory); “boughten” items were saved for school only.

• Lunchboxes and some school tablets featured pictures of celebrity cowboys such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

• Recess when we went down the slide in a group, played baseball, enjoyed hide and seek, used the trees surrounding the school ground to play cowboys and robbers, built snow forts in winter and had big snowball fights.

• Those new dresses Mom sewed especially for school and how we changed them promptly after school so that we could wear them more than once.

• Cutting out leaves to decorate the walls of the classroom.

• The teacher reading stories aloud to us from “The Instructor” magazine, and how I loved to listen as I drew and colored; it helped me concentrate.

• Walking home from school, all the time thinking about a snack that was waiting, such as hot baked bread, dripping with butter.

• Playing “find the place” on the map pulled down from the top of the chalkboard during wet recesses or games of hangman on the chalkboard.

• Getting water from the water crock in the anteroom, in earlier years, poured into tin cups, in later years put in cone-shaped Dixie cups.

• The “smell” of wet gloves drying on the gas heater after a wet recess.

• Writing answers on workbook pages for reading, math, social studies, Colorado history and geography.

• Penmanship time for all grades to practice making loops, up and down “swoops” and letters on penmanship paper, sometimes with pens dipped in ink.

• Writing and illustrating my own stories in tablets — I still have them — when I was finished with other assignments.

• Asking the teacher for “just 5 more minutes” during recess to finish a game and being granted the request.

• Being able to see my parents working on second cutting hay across the road during recess.

There are lots of memories of early school years in the Morapos School. Who could have guessed the impact of technology during later years?