I can’t believe that school will be starting in less than two weeks.

When I went to school, a longtime ago, our country school started after Labor Day. Years later, when I rode the bus to attend high school in Craig, we started a little earlier. I remember because the Moffat County Fair was going on just before school started. In fact, we high school kids had to take time off from the fair to go register for school and get our books.

Anyway, I attended the Morapos School, a country school, through eighth grade. The school and teacherage ( teacher’s house) were just down the road from our house. In fact the school and teacherage still set on our ranch property.

As I remember, we were pretty excited about the start of school. After all, we’d get to spend time with cousins and neighboring kids. Mom made my sisters and me dresses (girls wore dresses to school in those earlier days). I particularly remember a colorful skirt that I wore with a peasant blouse.

Sometimes we had new lunch pails. In those days, they were decorated with cowboys, like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and others. The boxes held thermoses for milk or soup (for cold days). We ate homemade bread at home, but Mom kept “boughten” bread for our sandwiches that were usually made from a potted meat mixture. We also had cookies and fruit with our lunches.

Perhaps the most exciting part of back-to-school was shopping in Craig for school supplies. We bought Big Chief tablets (although some special tablets at the time featured pictures of cowboy celebrities on the covers), crayons, pencils, erasers and maybe notebook paper. When I was in the lower grades we had to have tin cups, with our names on them, for water.

The school furnished penmanship paper, pens and ink, construction paper, glue and scissors.

I think they may have furnished the books, too. In later years, there was a water cooler with a button to push to get water. We used Dixie cups instead of tin cups, but the paper cups had to last all day.

I can remember how we looked over our school supplies after buying them, especially the crayons. A big box of crayons was a big treat. We took the crayons out and looked at them but never used them as they

We didn’t stay at school that first day. Our moms took us and we registered. Sometimes we had a new teacher. If so, my sisters and I had probably already met her because Mom was secretary/treasurer of the local school board, and the teacher was probably interviewed in our home (but without us who were sent elsewhere). So that first day we were all dressed up in our new clothes, and we had to go home in an hour. What a bummer.

After that, we walked to and from school all during the year. We enjoyed school, but there was not the excitement of the back-to-school days.