Times has changed now to what they used to be. You know they used to go to school

and they'd walk to the schools two and three miles and then they'd have a big Christmas play on

Christmas and they'd have sannies you know they'd dress and handle the presents

all out and a big tree you know and hit full of toys and the

children they enjoyed that they'd have speaking and singing and they just really enjoyed that but now anymore see they all go on the bus

they don't walk and go now and they enjoyed all of them walking being, packaging for us to school.

It's about, well, a school houses used to be all ramming and they may all have seen them out of town, you know, they don't go to these schools.

Houses like they used to.

My name is Anders Mather. I was rather shamefully, deeply asleep when Loretta knocked on my door at 11 this morning,

and I had to make some hasty excuse about a late night of correspondence to deflect her worry for me.

She informed me she thought there was an air leak around the bottom plate of the schoolhouse

stove in a place that is difficult to tighten up and that the fire was actually running too hot

with the students sitting close getting too warm. She'd briefly left the

nately girl to oversee them as they began their lunch.

I nodded, apologized awkwardly for my unshaven appearance, and followed her out into the cold

to cross the schoolhouse and attempt a repair if need be. I was

immediately struck by the stark melancholy of the sky above us. Its color

made me hesitate on my front step. The

unbroken whiteness of the snow on the plain sat in dramatic contrast to the bruised almost sedimentary dark above the horizon.

I have lived in the county long enough to know that what I was looking at was normally only a harbinger of a short burst of warmer

weather, but I've never overcome the sense of loneliness that such a forlorn sky instills.

I caught up to Loretta as she crunched through the shallow snow cover in her gleaming white boots.

...