There are some details that I can’t remember from my childhood. And, according to experts, some of the details that I think I remember may not be accurate. It seems that the stories we tell the most often are the ones that are most likely to be inaccurate. We embellish as we tell stories over and over the course of time they become less accurate. What we think we remember with certainty has changed from the actual events. I think I remember going back to school in the fall. It was a ritual of my life from the age of 5 through 24. In that span of time, I managed to get through Kindergarten, public elementary and high school, college and graduate school, with roughly the same routine: start the school year in the fall, continue through the winter and spring, and take the summer off from formal schooling. We called it summer vacation, but somewhere along the line, I started working at summer jobs for income. In the first years, I had part-time jobs such as mowing lawns, sweeping out a feed warehouse, and other chores. By the time I was in my teens, I was working long days contributing to a farm or business.

In my mind there were certain rituals to returning to school. We often, if not always, got a new outfit to wear to school in the late summer or early fall. The actual days of the change of seasons didn’t always correspond to the school schedule. As our father said many times, “Summer weather in Montana is July, August, and September - not June, July and August.” He thought that the school should continue until at least mid June and not resume until mid September. It never happened that way. The time between Memorial Day and Labor Day was considered to be summer vacation in all of the schools I attended. The exact days didn’t quite line up. We might have to go to school a few days beyond Memorial Day and, I think we may have occasionally started school before Labor Day as well. The return to school lined up with the time around my middle sister’s birthday. Today is that day: September 3. I always thought that it was unfortunate to have a birthday that lined up with back to school. My birthday, June 15, was squarely in summer vacation and I associated it with the freedom from routine that came with the break.

Try as hard as I can, I don’t remember the first day of kindergarten. I attended a private kindergarten. There was no public kindergarten in our town in those days. Our classes were held in the basement of a private home across the street from the park, just a few blocks from our home. I can remember the name of my teacher and a few other details, but that is about all.

I have a distinct memory of the first day of first grade, when I was six years old. I was finally able to go to the real school where my sisters went. It was just a block from our house. What I remember about the first day is that in the morning the teacher asked me to tell her my middle name. I don’t have a middle name, just an initial. I suppose what she said was something like, “When you go home for lunch, ask you mother what your middle name is.” What I got into my mind was that when I went home for lunch I would not be able to come back to school because I didn’t have a middle name. I remember fighting to hold the tears back as I walked the block home from school and bursting into the back door of the house and I couldn’t hold them back any longer. I refused to go back to school until my mother agreed to come with me and explain my name to my teacher.

I think school got better after that.

Back to school is a much bigger event in a lot of school districts this year because the pandemic has resulted in more than a year of “on again, off again” schooling for so many children. Our grandchildren were homeschooled during much of the pandemic. The public schools in their district offered some online schooling and at first they tried to participate, but it was insufficient, so their parents stepped in, purchased curriculum, and set up a homeschool routine. We helped with the lessons one day a week after we moved here late last fall.

The decision to return to public school this fall was based on a lot of different factors, one of which is that the parents are exhausted. Working full time, juggling schedules so that someone is home for the children every day, trying to teach a balanced curriculum, and keeping the house up turned into a lot of work and stress for parents. There is a sense of relief as the children begin their school.

The school has planned a measured start to the school year. Classes for the children began on September 1. Today is the third day of school. Monday is Labor Day, so next week will be four days of school and the following week will be five days of school and the routine will be established. I think, however, that life in the public schools will be anything but routine this year. Schools here have a mask mandate and the first activity of each day is hand washing. As long as there is no vaccine for children, Covid fears remain for parents and teachers. Then there is the simple fact that may children, like our grandchildren, are returning after having been away for more than just the summer. Different children have had different educational experiences during the pandemic. Some have received almost no instruction. Others had private tutors and teachers and lots of learning experiences. They all are returning together and teachers have to find instructional models that somehow bridges the differences in what the children have learned.

In this complex set of circumstances, we begin a ritual that we have observed for many years - 40 days of prayer for children. We pray for children and their parents and their teachers at the beginning of the school year. May God guide and protect them in these troubled times.