50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

I have reached inside a century old collection of poems, titled One Hundred Narrative Poems. I used it a couple years ago to search out three poems originating during the U.S. Civil War. Part of those poems showed up in One Surrender, my second book focused on specific Civil War activity.

I choose particular stanzas from John Greenleaf Whittier  titled  In School-days. Those of us connect  emotionally  with  rural one-room  schools because we attended them, or listened as relatives gave us first hand tales of what took place  in days long past.

Still sets the schoolhouse by the road,

A ragged beggar sunning;

Around it still the sumachs grow,

And blackberry vines are running

My mom taught in one of those country schools, fresh from a year’s schooling in Normal Training, Cedar Falls, Iowa, now UNI. That was probably 1923. She was seventeen.

Within, the master’s desk is seen,

Deep scarred by raps official;

The warping floor, the battered seats,

The jack knife’s carved initial

My wife Rhoada and two of her siblings got a ride to their one room school from their dad, and walked back home on nice afternoons. My wife says she learned much from listening to lessons taught to older farm kids schooled there. Early schooling stories were refreshed during  festive times on farms. The poet Whittier’s poem bends from destruction of one unused country schoolhouse to a tale of youthful fascination. We discover adventure of one school day which turns on outcome of a spelling bee.

He saw her lift her eyes’ he felt

The soft hand’s slight caressing,

And heard the tremble of her voice,

as if a fault confessing. 

I’m sorry I spelt the word: 

“I hate to go above you, 

Because”—the brown eyes lower fell– 

“Because, you see, I love you!”

To  close this sentimental poem, affection that day, that hour, had not been forgotten.

Still memory to a gray haired man

That sweet child face is showing,

Dear girl! The grasses on her grave

Have forty years been growing!

Famed poet and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes  called the poem the most beautiful school boy poem in the English language. In his small town of Lineville, Iowa grandfather, G.W. Molleston, owned a firm he called Molleston Maytag. G.W. bought an old schoolhouse, painted it red, and moved it to high ground north of Lineville.  It was a civic project, he said. Maybe he was Mayor at that time.

We are hopeful that April will bring new life to our lawns, beds and trees and shrubs we are so proud of.

Join me then, please.