(As a new school year begins, I’d like to offer this Women In Motion column from 1982 as a tribute to all of our teachers in Newberry County. You make all the difference in so many students’ lives, and our community is blessed to have teachers care as deeply as you do: we thank you for the beauty you bring to children’s lives. Those of you who attended the old Boundary Street School will find familiar territory here, and I hope you enjoy the memories. My thanks to all for the past 30 years of Women In Motion, and my best wishes to everyone for a great school year! Love, Sue) It ought to become easier with each child, but it doesn’t. Not really. Janie started first grade this morning, but I don’t feel any older. As a matter of fact, it made me feel younger.

Six years old, to be precise.

I don’t remember how I travelled there, but I do remember being there. Old Boundary St. School smelled of oiled floors that morning in 1958. I didn’t know at the time what caused the smell, but I knew it was strange and pungent and new. It seemed that everything there was new, though it might have been a hundred years old—or even a thousand.

As I walked up the steps, I felt a hundred years old instead of six. I was wearing shoes again after a summer of toes dipping into sand. I was wearing a dress but not in church, after a summer of bubble suits and shorts.

Clutching my mother’s hand, I stood at the door and viewed a sea of children, strangers all, it seemed. Finally, I recognized one girl from my Sunday School class. I was led to a desk on the other side of the room from her, a desk of real wood with a dark musty cubby hole. Our mothers did not leave the room—would not leave, I suppose, until they had decided we would survive the morning. They stood around the walls of the classroom, like so many quilting squares blown against a baseboard by a sudden breeze.

They leaned forward as Mrs. McWhirter began to speak to them, and the tension eased somewhat. She handed each mother a sheet of paper, and they they filed out, waving tiny good-byes and whispering quiet good lucks over their shoulders. Only one of our number cried. I doubt if there were any of us who didn’t want to.

Mrs. McWhirter smiled at us, spoke softly and reassured us that our mothers would come to pick us up later in the day. We sang for a while, and she talked about all the wonderful things we would do that year. I was always a skeptic. Between the red spot of vaccination on my left arm and the tight pinch of the shoes on my feet, I wasn’t believing any of it. My cousins and my brothers did not describe school as wonderful, but as hard. I wasn’t nearly as smart as they were, and I thought there would be hard times ahead.

It took six weeks or so, but Mrs. McWhirter made a believer out of me.

Most of my first-grader classmates went home early, but I had to wait until my older brothers were ready to leave. Those few of us who stayed late were allowed to read from a book other than the one we used in class. We left Dick and Jane and Sally behind, and we read stories about people and animals that our classmates did not know. There, we encountered words they had yet to learn.

One day I sounded out all by myself: the word “beautiful.”

Mrs. McWhirter stuck out her tongue (high praise, from her), arched her shoulders and rolled her eyes. She smiled a hundred (or a thousand) watt smile at me--and said something encouraging, but I don’t remember what. Her smiling eyes, I remember clearly.

I think that was when I truly believed her. Yes indeed, school was wonderful. (I was used to the shoes by then.)

The old Boundary St. School started to feel like home. I learned the names of my classmates, and one day our class was invited to the Halloween carnival by children in higher grades, carrying brightly colored posters that they had made themselves. The lunchroom smells of cabbage and gingerbread mingled with the classroom smells of chalk and glue—and somehow they all seemed as familiar as my grandmother’s kitchen. As time went by, I became a bit bolder, and I soon discovered the hidden places of the school. I saw where the school bell was rung, and one early morning I walked across the boys’ side of the playground.

We moved on from coloring Halloween pumpkins to Thanksgiving turkeys, then from Santa Claus’ sleigh to Valentines, then from daffodils to beach umbrellas...

The first thing I knew, my first year of school was over.

Our Think and Do books were thought and done, the pictures we’d colored were packed away in our book satchels, and our grade mothers had come and gone for our end-of-school party.

My fellow students disappeared one-by-one until, like the little piggies, they were “wee, wee all the way home.”

At last, only Mrs. McWhirter and I were left. She was waiting on me, and I was waiting on my brothers, and then our summers would begin.

Of course, she had given me a book. At the end of the first story, I stared at her a long time before she glanced up from her desk and flashed me one of her 100 (or 1000) watt smiles.

I smiled back, then continued with my reading.

On the first or second page, a familiar word caught my eye, and I spelled it aloud: “B-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l.”

I said it again, let it fall from my tongue like so much molasses dripping from a hot buttered biscuit.

“Beautiful,” I said, more softly—looking directly at Mrs. McWhirter one more time.

I was reading. She had taught me to read. She had made me believe that I could read.

And well, reading was wonderful.

“Beautiful,” I said again, beaming up at Mrs. McWhirter.

And she was. She certainly was.