The Faith of a Writer

Excerpt

Chapter One

As a child I took for granted what seems wonderful to me now: that, from first through fifth grades, during the years 1943–1948, I attended the same single-room schoolhouse in western New York that my mother, Carolina Bush, had attended twenty years before. Apart from the introduction of electricity in the early 1940s, and a few minor improvements, not including indoor plumbing, the school had scarcely changed in the intervening years. It was a roughhewn, weatherworn, uninsulated woodframe building on a crude stone foundation, built around the turn of the century near the crossroads community of Millersport, twenty-five miles north of Buffalo and seven miles south of Lockport. I loved my first school! - so I have often said, and possibly this is true.

In late August, in anticipation of school beginning immediately after Labor Day in September, I would walk the approximate mile from our house, carrying my new pencil box and lunch pail, to sit on the front, stone step of the school building. Just to sit there, dreamy in anticipation of school starting; possibly to enjoy the sol ... read full excerpt from: The Faith of a Writer ebook