When I was a little girl I longed to ride the school bus. Every day I would watch my older brothers and sister climb the steps of the bus and head to school.  I always missed them when they left and couldn’t wait until they got home.  When it came near time for the school bus to bring them home, Mom would tell me  and my little brother, David, and I would run out to the swing set by the road and sit in the swings and wait.  When we saw the school bus coming down the road we got all excited.  The bus was always noisy and it just looked like fun to me

Finally the day came for my first day of school.  Mom tied the sash of my new dress into a pretty bow and brushed my hair.  I was so excited.   I was going into the first grade. Our little school had no kindergarten and went from first grade to grade twelve in the same building.  I already knew how to read as I pretty much taught myself.

Suddenly my brothers yelled, “The school bus is coming!” and out the door we all went and crossed the gravel road and waited for the bus to stop.  The steps were high and I was little and the bus driver looked scary.   I climbed the steps and stood there facing strangers staring back at me. I quickly took the very front seat while my brothers and sister went to the back of the bus.   Down the road we went.  We picked up a little girl whose nanny goat had followed her down her long lane.  I learned her name was Jennifer and she sat by me.   We soon became friends.  We were both in the first grade.

When we got to school, we all piled out and went to our classes. My sister probably took me the first day as I don’t remember how I found my room.  The day seemed long and I was homesick and couldn’t wait for the bus to take me home.    For the longest time during my first year of school, every time the bus brought me home on Friday I thought I was finished with school. In fact on Sunday nights when Mom would tell me I had to go to bed early because school was tomorrow, I would start to cry.   It’s not that I hated school. I just loved being home with my mother so much more.   But I would get on the bus on Monday morning and go to school once again.

As I became an old hand at riding the bus, I became more courageous.  Now we had a bus driver, Cecil Richmond who ran a tight ship. No one was to change seats and loud talking was not allowed. He carried a switch over his visor and he kept his eye on his passengers at all times. He scared me to death.  I never saw him use the switch on anyone, but I wasn’t going to test him. I did forget once and changed seats and he yelled at me.  I never did that again!  But he wasn’t all bad.  Mr. Richmond ran a gas station in our little town  and every Christmas, as long as he drove the bus, on the way home from school on the last day before Christmas break, he would drive his bus to his gas station, get out, go inside and come out carrying boxes of candy bars for all his passengers. Back in the 50’s you could buy regular candy bars in a pack of six.  That is what he gave each of us. A six pack!  We looked forward to it every year.

When Mr. Richmond retired, my best friend’s father drove the bus through my senior year. We all knew each other then.  Now I wonder if parents know who is driving their children.

I have fond memories of sitting in the back of the bus and gossiping with my girl friends, learning how to kiss( we used our arms to practice kissing) and when we got older, flirting with boys in cars behind the bus.  I had a boyfriend one time we picked up on the way to school and I always couldn’t wait to see him.  Yes, I have kissed boys on the bus, including my husband when we went to the same school.    Later, during the basketball season I would ride the booster bus to the games in other towns and it was the most fun.  We would sing and flirt with the boys and yell cheers for our basketball team.  The bus driver had to have had a lot of patience or he wore ear plugs.

Nowadays most children are driven to school by their parents.  The big yellow school bus still goes by where I live now and I always think of the fun times I had riding one.   My children rode the bus. I said if it went by our house, they were going to ride it.   They did until they got older and either caught a ride or had a car of their own.  I wonder if kids like riding the bus as much as I did growing up.

Here’s to big yellow school buses and the people who drive them. Bye.

I have dreamed all my life.  I remember dreams I had when I was a young girl.  Some were really scary.  Some were rather funny.  David says he hardly remembers dreaming at all, although one night years ago he was fighting with someone in a dream and he punched me on the arm.  I shook him awake and told him what he had done.  He didn’t remember the dream. I have very vivid dreams that I remember for a long time. Some I cannot remember as soon as I wake up.

I read one time that we dream in only black and white.  Wrong. My dreams are in bold Technicolor and three dimensional.   I don’t know whether it’s because my neck has been hurting at night when I am in bed and my synapses are all screwed up, but the last couple of dreams I have had were so vivid and so real, I thought they were really happening.  You know those movies made in the fifties where the colors are so vivid?  That’s my dreams.

The other night I dreamed David and I were driving in England in our little PT Cruiser and off in the distance I saw the White Cliffs of Dover.  Now I have always wanted to go to England and see the cliffs, so in my dream I was really excited.  I told David to drive up to them and he made an immediate right hand turn and was driving on a rocky cliff with drop offs on both sides. The really strange thing was, I was standing outside of the car yelling at him to get off the cliff as he bumped and rolled on ahead of me. I was so scared.  I ran down this big mountain we were on and saw David driving down the side of it just as easy as pie.  My sense of relief was so great, I thought I would cry.   We arrived in this village where people were dressed up. The men wore bright blue jackets with white pants and white shoes and the women were wearing what looked like dresses out of the 1930’s, long and slender. The sky was a brilliant blue and the white cliffs that could be seen were so very white.  The people were just milling about and I could see just a corner of the cliffs around a corner, but could not get to them.  So, I went up to this very tall woman, she was at least six feet tall, with short, curled blonde hair and a very haughty look upon her face, and asked her if there were boats taking tours to the White Cliffs of Dover.  She said no, but there……..and there is where I could not understand a single word she was saying. Almost like a foreign language even though she was speaking English.   I was very disappointed. Then all the people started to exit this courtyard, going, I knew not where and I tried to walk to the cliffs and saw that the ocean was raging and a storm was at sea.  Then I woke up.  Hmmmmm.

I don’t know how that dream would be analyzed, but it was very strange.

I dreamed I shot someone in a dream once. I won’t say who as it was a long time ago, but I remember waking up shaking and feeling absolutely horrible and didn’t want to go back to sleep.   It wasn’t someone I disliked, either.  So, don’t know where that dream came from. It was right after President John F. Kennedy was shot so I probably had shooting on my mind.

When I had a tooth pulled years ago, I had laughing gas. I had a very fun dream during the time I was under. I was having a party with Disney characters with balloons and singing and having a wonderful time. When I came to from the gas, I was laughing and telling the dentist I had just been to a party.

Every night when I go to sleep, I pray to God I will have pleasant dreams.  I always wonder what I will dream about. There are certain things I cannot see before I go to sleep. Snakes. I saw some yellow snakes on tv one evening and that very night I dreamed there were yellow snakes under my dresser striking at me.  So, I cannot see a snake or even think of one before retiring for the night.

Do you have strange dreams?  Do you dream in color?   I find dreams very interesting.  Do they represent something in our lives?  I don’t know.  I just know I have a very interesting  dream life.

Here’s to dreams, the good ones. Bye.

I always wondered why the term “under the weather” meant one was not feeling well.   Some weather I love to be under, like sunshine, soft rain, cooling breezes and more.  But I will just say I have been under the weather for a few weeks.  Not completely under, mind you. I have been functioning and doing all the things I normally do, just not feeling completely up to par.

Today I think I felt the worst I have felt in a long time.  Let me explain what I think started all this. Two or three weeks ago, I went outside on our back deck to empty the dogs’ water pan and put fresh water in it. It was dark out and I didn’t turn on any lights.  I bent over to pick up the pan and rose up and hit the top of my head hard on a frame for canopy we have right outside the door.  And I mean hard.  It hurt.  But I went about my business of filling the pan so the dogs would have fresh water and went to bed that night thinking nothing of it. I am always banging myself on something. I drove a huge stake in my calf one year, bandaged it up and went to a Cincinnati Reds game with our son.  I try not to let things stop me. But today, I woke up aching in every single muscle in my body.  It hurts to turn over in bed or to try to get out of bed.

Part of my pain might stem from the fact that Saturday I helped with a funeral dinner for a lady in our church who had passed away , as I was carrying food out of the kitchen, returning food to the kitchen, washing dishes, taking out trash, and just being busy for several hours.  We fed over one hundred people and there was a lot of food to move around.  After five hours of this and cleaning the kitchen, we all left and went home. I was so tired, I went to bed extra early, but could not sleep because every muscle in my body was screaming with pain.  My neck, especially.  All day today I could hardly move without pain running throughout my body.  I don’t take pain very well and when I feel unwell, I just want to crawl into bed and lay there and not be bothered.     It especially bothers me as David has had four days off this weekend and I want to do something fun with him and just don’t feel like getting out of a chair.  Here I am in my husband’s lounge chair at one o’clock in the morning watching “Julie and Julia,” one of my favorite movies, and feeling, well, not so well.

I think I have a low grade fever and that makes me feel even worse.  I almost rather it was a full blown fever that would kill all the bad germs coursing through my body, but instead it’s a fever that just taunts me with unease and the feeling of always being warm.  But then I feel chilled and can’t get warm. Maybe it’s the flu and a combination of other things, but I know I am ready to be done with it.

I am not a good patient either.  I don’t want to be waited on or hovered over.  If I am hungry, I get my own food and I try to hydrate myself continually.

Gee, I am sounding like a whiner and I really don’t mean to. It’s kind of cathartic to talk about something that is bothering you and sometimes it makes things better. I am hoping this will pass before I have to make a visit to my family doctor.   I don’t like to take pills and I know he would prescribe antibiotics.  I just got over a run of antibiotics and steroids a few weeks ago that left me depleted and tired.  I have decided steroids will not be something I will take ever again.  They are really not good for people and the less you have to do with them, the better. I am not a doctor, but I saw what steroids did to my system.  It took  weeks for them to get out of my body.

Are you a  good patient when you are ill?  Do you like being cared for or are you like me and just want to hide under your blankets and be left alone?   I really hope this will pass soon. I have so many things to do this Spring and places to go.

Here’s to good health. Bye.