Thursday, February 18, 2010

Ash Wednesday

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday and I was thinking about the good old days at "Jefferson Jailhouse". (The elementary school we attended through 6th grade). Our school was very near a private Catholic school (St. Mathias) and the community we lived in was predominately Catholic. On Ash Wednesday as I recall it, our Backwoods neighborhood kids (6-8 kids) and the teachers were about the only ones there for a couple of hours in the morning! Around 10 AM all the other kids came rolling in with ashes on their foreheads. I even remember some of them still had those ashes on their foreheads a few days later!!!


We had some real doozies at that school! No one wanted to have their desk near those kids, you can be sure! The girls in that family even had pierced ears with hoops in them!!!! Horror of horrors! In those days the only people we knew who had pierced ears were gypsies! Really, no one had pierced ears and it was considered dirty and "bad" to have them. (I'm guessing that the dirty part was very local due to this family). Now even I have pierced ears but not before a lot of coaxing from my children and because I do like just a small diamond stud in my ears. My dire predictions about how my ears would become infected and fall off were partially true. I did have lots of infections and finally had to have them redone before I got rid of the infections.

Tomorrow I will be talking about our Valentine weekend trip to Holly Lake Ranch so today I want to post a really cool picture we took to pique your curiosity. Also to try out my new computer's possibilities for pictures. ( another story for this blog).

8 comments:

  1. Great Picture!! Who actually took the shot? Definitely can see a family resemblance here! You should have the girls enter my name #924 contest!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think a lot about Jefferson these days. Remember baby footing our way all the way to school (it was drummed into our heads 1.2 miles!) We got to school real late that day and boy were we in trouble!. How about Mrs. Shultz's potatoe pancakes when all the mothers would come to help just so they could also indulge.

    I just found out, while shoveling snow the other day, that the family down the street was from the Milwaukee area, he from Fox Point and she from ....... You guessed it Greenfield! She went to elementry school at Glenmount (where ever that was, probably somewhere near the old Town Hall). She is younger because she went to Greenfield High School but her brother went to Pulaski because he was before the high schools.

    I never noted the big Catholic presense at Jefferson, but did when we took the bus to Wauwatosa because of all the Pope Pius kids that rode it. However they were on holiday most of the time. I always remember the real outlaw bebops among them that had greesed down sideburns, wore drapes ane chains dangling from their pockets :-) Well there,s a lot more I've been thinking about but got to go.

    T

    ReplyDelete
  3. Of course I remember Jefferson - best education anyone could have. The math I learned there helped me breeze thru high school algebra, trig etc. - I remember, too, that Backswoods families were the only families in the school who had subscriptions to magazines. That came to light when, Mr Avery (I think), asked us to bring articles from magazines for some social studies projects. - Remember the recesses blocking up the rivers of melting snow?
    Sue

    ReplyDelete
  4. I remember making dams out of snow both at school and in our private road and getting severe tongue lashings for 1. "Flooding and destroying school property" What??? the hills left over from when they excavated the hole to build the school 20 or 30 years before? Or could it have been the "baseball diamond" at the foot of the hills, where we had to make paths every Spring just to figure out where the bases were supposed to be.

    and 2. "ruining the road for driving" by making ruts and gullies so Eddie Elton got stuck. Almost as bad as the time we broke the water pipe to his chicken coop by jumping on it. Lynn

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love the picture! Its my backaground at work. It ousted Brendin in his dress uniform (that one only lasted one day!)

    Marianne

    ReplyDelete
  6. Boy! I forgot about the spring rivers we used to make! Only Ned and I can remember how our class alone was blamed one year and we had to go outside after noon hour to break down the dams!!! Gee.....what a punishment!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I guess the gypsy story is why I had to have my ears pierced using a potato and in the basement in Karen Fuller Walkers grandmas basement in Denver.

    Carla

    ReplyDelete
  8. Micah actually took the picture. It was his idea and he posed us all! My butt was cold and wet the rest of the day!

    ReplyDelete