Finally

I did some applique today for the first time in about eight weeks. Some of it was fun and some was very frustrating. The fun part was the obvious and the usual. Choosing the fabrics to make the pieces, carefully making the templates, getting each piece cut out. The frustrating part was various issues including not having sewn in eight weeks--muscle memory does play a huge part in most of what we do with our hands so if we are out of practice, our work suffers. I kept pulling the needle off the thread, necessitating re-threading. The re-threading was also fraught with problems relative to the new/old house.

I don't have my sewing room completely set up yet so I am sewing in the living room section of the great room that forms the main part of this 1737 house. There are multiple windows but the stone walls (all the window sills are more than a foot deep) and the big eaves make those windows very shaded and relatively small so depending on the hour of the day the sun might not be where you want it. In a modern house we overcome that difficulty by adding light fixtures but in a house of this age even the light fixtures are few and far between. Don't get me wrong--I am still enamored of this old house but until I get my sewing room set up, I am stuck in what is a pretty formal living area. And even that is my choice since I don't ever have a TV in my living or dining rooms, not ever in all my years of marriage or even in my childhood. Of course here the previous owner did have TV in this room so there are wires and fixings and gobbledegook that is  ugly and intrusive that I have been coiling up and tucking as best I can into the built in cabinets.

 But eventually, I will have my sewing room set up with adequate lighting and I will be back in the groove with my own muscle memory of how to thread a needle and how to make small stitches. So far the rabbits are just looking in from the outside at the new plantings but my Beatrix Potter memories tell me that they are known to dig under chicken wire.

Planning Ahead

Yesterday we planted tomatoes, eggplant, squash and herbs. Putting in a garden always feels good because our optimism overcomes our experience. We usually have good luck with our produce gardens but occasionally something happens and our dreams are shattered. There are numerous events and problems that can occur and we already know one of the big ones here--rabbits. Lots and lots of fat fluffy rabbits hopping around, so we put cages around each plant.

There is another sort of pest that I knew lived on the land here but I didn't expect to come face to "face" with so soon. I went into the woods across the stream to dig some leaf humus to augment the soil and came out with a tick on my head. It had not done anything yet, just crawling around looking for a good spot, but it was a sobering reminder of nature's power. We didn't have ticks or fleas in Salt Lake City but our dogs will have to be protected from both here.

Sore And Tired

We are not even close to being done but every box emptied is another step on the path. I have found several items broken or missing pieces, the two irreplaceable pieces being a salad cruet set my mother purchased in Germany sometime between 1952 and 1956. Most of it is here but the mustard jar lid is gone like the wind. The other piece that has lost a component is an antique toy tractor that lost its driver somewhere. It's a Marx toy so made out of pressed metal as was the little man. Several pieces of art had the glass broken and my Peruvian angel lost the head.

We planted the peonies we brought from Utah today and the dwarf raspberries and hummingbird collections. The landscaping rule of thumb is that you should spend ten percent of your home's value on that but I don't think that would make much of a dent in what needs to be done here. Even getting rid of the dandelions might take ten percent of the value.

But the good news is that I am slowly making this look like home even if what I am doing now is sort of temporary. The main room that is a combined living and dining area (remember that the original house was built in 1737 so there are fireplaces at both ends) has wainscoting all around with a plate rail on top on that so I have perched art entirely around the room without having to put any nails in. When I paint this room I will switch to using the picture molding, a system I learned to appreciate in the big house in Utah.

Our big Victorian bed is in place in the master bedroom. The movers at first told me it wouldn't work but I not only insisted that it would (I had measured every angle), but explained in a combination of Spanish and English just how to do it. I think they were surprised but there was no way I was going to let them just give up without following my instructions. Then they brought up the box spring following the same plan without a whisper. We had to take the casters off the bed since the ceilings are lower but that only affects dusting under the bed, it isn't a structural component.  

Not My First Time at the Rodeo

This move makes the 30th time I have moved. There were 9 moves with my parents as an Army brat and now 21 moves since 1970 married to my husband. I am definitely not complaining about any of that even though there were always sorrows and regrets involved in any move. But unfortunately I haven't gotten any smarter.

Unpacking the boxes in the kitchen today was a smack in the face. Why do I have four different sets of china? Why do I have four different kinds of rice? Where did I put the --- (fill in the blank). The new/old house already shows its character by showing me how profligate my life has been. I thought I had downsized, not only for this move but when we went from the old mansion to the bungalow. But this will be a whole new experience.

My last house had the best pantry I have ever had. Unfortunately I took full advantage of that. This house is not a Costco house--there is no place to put a dozen paper towel rolls or 24 toilet paper rolls.
Still I am happy to be here in my new/old house even surrounded by boxes that have no particular place to go. We have already seen multiple cardinal pairs and flickers and big fat squirrels.   

All The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring

Tomorrow is closing day on the new(old) house. Because we changed our address for the USPS we are already getting mail there. Then  ordered some dwarf raspberry plants and two "hummingbird" collections for pots for the porch and those have already arrived. My husband and I visited a hardware store today and I purchased some chive seeds, some Italian parsley seeds, some picture hangers and two dinner plate dahlia corms. Although we won't have any furniture, we plan to spend the night there tomorrow.

The property already has multiple plantings though nothing that  anyone would describe as landscaping except perhaps the small pond that looks like an amateur built it. As long as it is functional we can work with that. There are blueberry bushes, a peach tree, hydrangea bushes, multiple rhododendron plants, and perhaps a zillion dandelions. My husband hates dandelions so he will have his work cut out for him.

Genre Books

When I knew I couldn't take books out of our neighborhood library in Salt Lake City anymore, I cast around for reading material available on Kindle and decent reading but not necessarily taxing reading as my brain has reached overload. Several people recommended The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which became book one of what turned out to be a series of books by separate authors of much the same genre. One is even written by Annie Barrows who finished The Guernsey... when her aunt was unable to. These might be described as women's books but that should not deter any male from reading one or all of them.

In no particular order after the first:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (see note above). An epistolary book set in the near aftermath of WWII in both the UK including London, the Isle of Guernsey, and brief letters or notes to and from Scotland and Australia. I knew something of the history of Guernsey including the occupation by the Germans but this is not simply about that part of the history. It is a fun and for me very quick read.

The Truth According To Us, by Annie Barrows. This is similar to the previous book and written entirely by the final author of that book who previously was known for a series of children's books. I enjoyed this book, perhaps more than the other, because the characters' psychology and motivation is darker and not always pleasing.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, by Katerina Bivald. This book is by a Swedish author but the entire book happens in Iowa with some small references to Sweden. The book is the author's first and is also a translation from the Swedish. This book is entirely in the 21st century, unlike the others, and because of the author's own roots provides an interesting take on the rural center of the US. I don't always agree with the author's book recommendations but then I don't always agree with anyone's book recommendations.

The book I am reading now is not the same genre but it came highly recommended by someone who does know language arts well. I haven't gotten very far in to the story but it is good so far. So I can tentatively recommend The Last Painting of Sara DeVos, by Dominic Smith. I already have the library card application for the county library system near our house so I will be good to go very soon.

Close to Home

We are in Swarthmore now waiting for our closing on Thursday. Today was only rain so our trek through the maelstrom is done for now. We need to do all sorts of busy work before then but at least we are here, alive and well which not everyone who went through Xanto can say.

Give me a chance to move in, to figure stuff out, and then I can start sewing again and if anyone wants to see southeastern Pennsylvania there is a new quilting friend there.

So glad to be off the highway.

Weather Pigpen

I don't know how many people remember Pigpen from the "Peanuts" cartoon series produced by Charles Schultz, but that's what I am beginning to feel like, not with a cloud of dust and dirt over me, but a cloud of severe weather. I have been chronicling our passage through the US so everyone knows that we have had sunny weather, blizzard weather, ice storms, torrential rain. We arrived in Ohio driving through rain that was occasionally so hard that it obscured vision through the windshield even with the wipers going at full blast. We got here around 5, showered, looked at what food options were available without having to drive too far, ended up at a place called Rockne's and sat down and watched the weather deteriorate even further. Rockne's is a "sports bar" so there are TVs all over the place, which while we were sitting there broke in to the sports broadcasting to say there was a tornado warning for the very county where I was at that moment  sitting.

That also comes back to the problem with eating on a long road trip. The options for eating that are in any way close to the road your motel or hotel is on are not haute cuisine and I would not expect that. But they also push large, large portions; big desserts with ersatz ingredients, breaded meat or giant portions of meat on a bun. It begins to feel like the movie "Wall-E" where everyone got too big to even sit up. I love food--I love eating--I love cooking--I raised sons who make their own cheese and one is a professional chef. At this point, after four days eating American road trip food, I don't even want to eat anything.

On an entirely different note, my husband and I met with four men in Iowa City who were so enthusiastic about receiving grandfather's goods that we came away feeling very good about the donation and the future of the material. We also found out that someone had written a book about my husband's mother, available only in Japanese, that we were unaware of before. After all of the back and forth with these men, my comment to my husband was that we always think of ourselves as pretty ordinary people but the stratum of society that we live in is extraordinary. One of the men we met with is from Denmark and his specialty is Chinese Buddhism but he has branched out to other areas of Asian studies. I told him that my husband and I were friends with a fellow who is a Buddhist priest and scholar at Harvard. It turns out that the people who are tops in the field are so few that he knew this guy as well, though perhaps not as well as we did since his interest was entirely scholarly.  The visit to IU was supposed to be about just grandfather's goods but they have a serious interest in anything my mother-in-law left, including all those obi and whatever kimono or personal items I still have. Then, as our dinner party was breaking up, I mentioned something about my father-in-law helping to write Japan's constitution post WWII. That shocked and froze everyone and they all said, "What?" My husband explained that his father had gone to Japan after the war with the US Army to be part of MacArthur's occupation team. While he certainly had an interest in doing that, his primary purpose was to try to find his wife, who had been repatriated to Japan with the Japanese embassy staff from DC following Pearl Harbor.

During his time in Japan that lasted from 1945 to the fall of 1950, he carried out many assigned tasks both for the US government and for MacArthur, including helping to write MacArthur's history of the Pacific war, a book that was then suppressed for thirty or so years until MacArthur's death. As it turns out, we have one of the few copies of that book that were published in the 50's but that's a whole different story. Anyway, my father-in-law was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate concentrating in World History from Harvard and a very learned fellow who spoke multiple languages. Curiously he did not speak Japanese until after Pearl Harbor (Greek, Latin, French, Spanish), but was trained by the US government once they decided that he was neither too old (he was 34 before they allowed him to enlist), nor too dangerous (his first wife was a German national that he met doing graduate work in Switzerland and his second wife was not only a Japanese national but one who chose to return to Japan during the war), to become part of the US Army. He went through the China-Burma theater working mainly as a propagandist but also as an interpreter if any prisoners were taken.

So MacArthur, who had multiple personality and ego issues but was no one's fool, recommended my husband's father as one of the Americans the Japanese should use to help with their constitution. The Japanese were more than happy to accept the recommendation because the family were samurai and well regarded in Japan.  The involvement of my father-in-law came up very recently in modern Japan because of Prime Minister Abe's militaristic stance. My husband's younger brother currently lives in Tokyo and was appalled that Japan might begin to rearm and reassert after decades of constitutionally mandated pacifism, so he wrote a long editorial for one of the bigger Japanese newspapers.

What I have written here sounds very cut and dried but my husband's parents' and grandparents' marriages were practically historic and major romantic events that would fit any romance novel scenario. Even my own maternal grandparents' marriage was charming but from a far more American viewpoint, similar to the Broadway play, "Abie's Irish Rose".

So even though we think of ourselves as normal people, everyday Americans, we have a different context to our understanding of history and people.

The Storm Has A Name

The major confluence of various storm systems in which we are traveling is named Xanto. Although we had issues getting across Nebraska two days ago, more than a hundred cars had to be rescued from the highway and we avoided that. It was raining when we arrived in Grand Island, Nebraska the night before last and the temperature plummeted overnight so everything outside was covered with a thick layer of ice in the morning. That included our car that was entombed from front grill to back trunk and had to be chipped out before we could get back on the road that was also ice covered.

The saving grace for us yesterday morning, besides the driving skills of my husband who used to go back and forth to work more than twenty miles a day in alpine conditions, was that we were practically the only car on the road. That's because the cars and trucks that tried to go before we did ended up in the median. It didn't look like injury accidents but like sliding uncontrollably but slowly off the road.

There is snow again this morning but the parking lot looks all right from inside the room. We'll see when we get outside. Then it's on to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio to just outside of Cleveland where we make our last stop before we get to southeastern Pennsylvania.

On a side note, there is a large Amish community near Iowa City and I was reading a circular in the motel lobby yesterday that advertised a quilt show and sale next week as the spring show. I hope the weather improves enough for them to hold the event because at this point no one would want to be wandering outside looking at quilts.

On another side note, the food served across the country has been all right for the most part but the portions have been gargantuan. We had lunch in Nebraska and the french fry servings looked like at least 4 potatoes per plate and the other proportions matched. Come on, people!   

Weather Woes

Anyone watching national weather here in the US knows there is a blizzard in the high plains, windy and hot conditions in the south, and very cold windy weather east of the Mississippi. We are right in the middle of the upper level of the maelstrom. We left very early from our motel in Hill City, SD this morning because the snow had already started about 3 am and the prediction was for 60 mph winds and 14 inches. So while we did manage to miss some of that, we drove in incredibly bad weather nearly the entire day on very small roads whose two saving graces were very little traffic and very straight roads. There were some hairy slides and some severe icing on the front of the car including the windshield wipers but the car is all wheel drive even though it looks like a race car so we kept our speeds down to safe levels and made it to Grand Island, Nebraska. Tomorrow we are going to Iowa City, Iowa, which is only about a five hour trek on an interstate highway but it is supposed to snow all day tomorrow as well.

Who Is Incompetent?

So I have been chronicling some of the problems that have arisen relative to our moving company but those were pretty minor compared to the end of the day yesterday. The two young helpers were definitely hard workers and sped everything up so in the early afternoon the house itself was pretty much empty. It's the "pretty much" part that is the problem. We kept pointing out items that needed to be loaded, items that the packers had been looking at for two days already.

So when the foreman said he was ready to do the walk-through to make sure that the house, yard, and garage were empty, I already knew there were going to be problems. I had done a quick look around before that so I began to point out all the stuff that was still not packed on the truck. This included cookbooks, racks, and trays from the kitchen; mirrors, art, and photos from the master bedroom; our entire patio set and some large empty planters from the yard, and the real kicker was they had left this large Chinese rug (supposedly a gift from Sun Yat-Sen to my husband's grandfather but who knows) on the floor in the living room--the room that all of them had been traversing on their way to the front door and the truck.

It's incomprehensible to me that when one hires a moving company that company can tell you that you are just going to have to leave your goods behind. When the foreman said to my husband that it had obviously been a long time since he had been moved professionally, I was wondering where the professional behavior was.

The other alarm yesterday was when the house was finally, more or less, empty we let our three cats out of their large crate and the oldest one pushed open a window left ajar by the movers and went on a walkabout. My cats are entirely housebound cats with extremely limited experience in the broader world. We searched for three hours with no luck. Then, finally, just when I was about to give up entirely, I took an assortment of paper plates and cutlery next door to see if our neighbors wanted it for their cabin. Hiding in the bushes by their front door, totally traumatized and paralyzed, was my old cat Barney. The hovering tragedy was dissipated.  

Tunnel Light

This morning the movers brought a couple of contract workers who appreciate the value of working quickly so goods are moving out of the house at a brisk rate. The scary part was when the foreman said he wasn't sure that absolutely everything would fit. He said that he might have to store some of the outdoor furniture and the garage goods (snow blower, bikes, garden tools, etc.) and send another truck to get it. Since I have already written about how manic I am about planning, you can guess that this sort of "Oops!" moment doesn't thrill me one bit.

But the good news is that we might indeed get out of here before the sun sets even if they have to store some goods. The new owners came by for the walk through but what the really wanted to know was what quirks or oddness was there with any of the appliances and where things were planted. So their purchase will be complete by midday next Tuesday and the sale will be recorded at that point. Since the house was only listed as of 3/7 getting everything done by 4/17 is pretty darn good. Although I have rarely had any trouble selling any house I owned, this speed was eye opening and there was no dickering since the market here is so hot. The house we purchased in Pennsylvania took more than 200 days to sell. Luckily that doesn't concern me since I definitely plan for this to be my body bag house.


Last night my husband and I slept on an air mattress that slowly became a no air mattress. We clearly did not get that much sleep so we are going to one son's house to sleep tonight before heading out tomorrow for parts eastward. We are taking the three cats to another son's house for the duration between leaving here and returning to pick up cats and dogs and some minor goods to put in a van for a second cross-country road trip. I won't be on that one since I will be doing whatever needs to be done sooner rather than later to get the new house up and running.

Not Done Yet

Although my husband and I signed all the papers today to finalize our side of the sale of the house and to start the final part of the purchase of the new house, the movers are still not done. Thankfully they are not paid by the hour but by the job and I suppose I am also thankful that they are wrapping and taping carefully but the nine hour job has already passed the 17 hour mark with no clear end in sight. The head of the two man crew (a few more men might have helped or at least one fast woman who didn't dither), came out to where I was sitting on the porch and said, "I am pretty sure we will be done by tomorrow afternoon." Then he added, "Thursday for sure."

The new owners are supposed to do their walk-through tomorrow morning at nine am and we are supposed to be in an entirely different state by Thursday afternoon, with a reservation already made. The walk-through will at least show that the refrigerator is sparkling clean and both ovens are sparkling clean but I don't think there is any way the floor will be sparkling clean tomorrow at nine. It's futile to wash the pathways that aren't covered by stacks of boxes or boxed up furniture and goods.

I just keep telling myself that it will end but it is pretty frustrating. 

Hiccups On The Way Out

The moving company we picked is rated one of the best in the country. It is not a franchise but a small company that does primarily military moves but they knew precisely what they would be getting in to not only because we filled out their questionnaire, but also because we faxed them the paperwork and estimate from a larger national firm. So when they informed us that they would be here early this morning and done by dinner time, nine hours total, we didn't question their timing since they supposedly know their business. Well they aren't going to make it. They already know they are going to work tomorrow to get on the road tomorrow and possibly not even until Wednesday. The new owners wanted to do a walk-through on Wednesday morning and that is still possible but the movers might still be loading the truck.

The kitchen is fully packed, the living room and dining room are fully packed. The upstairs will go faster because we don't have knickknacks up there and all the books are already packed. Most of the clothing is either already in dress or suit bags or in dresser drawers so that won't be a big slow down either.

No matter what we are signing papers tomorrow and leaving on Thursday so if we have to clean around the movers or even hire a cleaning crew to come in, we are prepared to do that. 

Everything Is Moving Quickly

The movers are coming on Monday, a few days earlier than expected, but not an issue for anything except what do we do between now and 4/19.

We can't move into our new house until 4/19 at the earliest. It will take us time to drive across the country and we are looking to expand that time by going to certain places we haven't seen, such as Mt. Rushmore. We are also stopping at the University of Iowa as I detailed earlier and I don't know how long that will take. Since we have to veer off I-80 to get to Philadelphia there are multiple quilting related places to visit no matter where we leave I-80.

My middle son and his wife came today to take items that we had already agreed to give them. There were several pieces of art, one large piece by artist Robert Deyber called The Oxbow Incident, that my daughter-in-law particularly likes. There are other pieces far less notable like a table my husband made of a sink cut-out from a butcher block counter that he put plumbing pipe legs on long before this 45 year old son was born.

It's strange to be leaving my sons. They are in Utah because of the decisions that their father made (trust me that it wasn't me), but they have established lives and friendships here and they are certainly old enough to take care of themselves.

By the way, my youngest son and his girlfriend will be featured in an upcoming article in Food and Wine magazine focusing on their "goat camp". I haven't talked to them about the latest episode of goat camp but I look forward to reading the article.

Surprise, Surprise

We have a definite date of April 19th for our possession of our Pennsylvania house but a more slippery date for the sale of our current house, even though the buyers are both physicians with a pre-approval for their purchase. What we didn't have until today was a clear date on the moving van and the movers coming. The company that we picked is one that moves military families all the time and all over the place which is one reason their bid was half the cost of the national moving company.

Because they bid based on where they ended up last, they only wanted to give an estimated day of pickup which ends up being this coming Monday, a few days earlier than we had expected. While that was a shock, it clears up some of the questions I had as to when we clean out the refrigerator and when we clean up the house--broom clean is the standard here as in most states.

So we will have an empty house, or nearly empty since there are some pieces that we plan to take to the dump--the couch that the hound destroyed early in his time with us that we fluffed up with pillows and blankets to use just as a pet bed as an example. We will also have a time lag between how long we expect the trip to take and when we need to be in Wallingford or where we need to go to sign the papers and get the keys.

We have been dumping and cleaning for a while even though we completely downsized 12 years ago when we sold the big house so I would like to say that it is easier this time. The problem is that my husband and I are both not hoarders but savers. We don't live wandering through piles of newspaper or books but we do cling. It's probably a human trait but both of us grew up under parents who lived through the Depression and WWII, one who spent those years in Tokyo, so our view of using and reusing is probably colored by that.

Then there is also the fact that when we moved in to this house we brought boxes of goods from the previous house that at least one of us never completely investigated. I love my husband truly and sincerely. He is probably the only man in the world who would put up with me. But besides the fact that his hearing has been impaired at least as long as I have known him, probably from playing banjo in a bluegrass band back in the day, he never really listens to anyone. So when I asked him after we moved in here to go through the boxes he had stacked so neatly behind his workstation, he nodded but did not react.

Today he tells me that he has found X Y Z , you name it, all the things I asked him to look for previously in the items that he had packed, I was happy that the items had turned up since my investigation into the boxes that I had packed and stored during the last move had not turned up any of them. But, naturally, as the long suffering wife, I pointed out that if he had done what I asked him to do, his life today would be easier. It won't change him and it certainly won't change how I feel about him but it is another symptom of the difference between men and women--at least in my house.

Update the Logjam

Now that we are days away from driving across the country, it looks as though we may have really found a home for my husband's grandfather's stuff and perhaps even for some of my mother-in-law's stuff. Grandfather went to the University of Iowa back at the very beginning of the 20th century, getting a master's degree. He wasn't the very first Japanese student but he was among the early graduates and he did eventually get to be pretty well-known.

I had contacted Iowa months ago, had a brief exchange of emails, and then nothing. Since we will be driving I80 eastward and Iowa is more or less the middle of the journey, my husband pushed himself to contact the fellow I had been emailing. Turns out the delay was due to some changes in the hiring and focus but now we have at least a firm commitment to meet with some representative bits. The fellow from UI is also a big fan of Japanese films so when he found out that my husband's mother had been a very well-known actress for Toho Studios and that we had some of her films and other sorts of souvenirs and memorabilia he was quite excited.

To me some of the more interesting stuff from Grandfather are the correspondence he sent back to both Japan and the US from Siberia during the Russian revolution. He took a boat trip there as a foreign correspondent because of his interest in socialism, leaving his wife and three children in the States. It sounds as though it was a chaotic and interesting trip.

Saying Good-bye

I never have that many students coming for tutoring or for college essay help. The largest number I ever had in one year was five. I don't advertise, I don't charge money, I don't allow parental interference.

But regardless of those restrictions, and the obvious other restriction of students resenting me, I usually end up with some. This year I have two young ladies who are trying to ace their AP essays and one who is trying to get accepted to college. Both contingents came to me with questions but the one that stood out was one I didn't expect.

I told all my teachers that I was moving back at the beginning of this school year but like everyone else they treated that as a fiction or improbable event. So the question that stymied me was about the change in the assigned books for AP English Literature.

For the first time ever, all the teachers pushed their reading faster but added another book to the end of the year--at least the end of the year up to the AP exam. For the first time the students will read Brave New World.

Last week one of my faithful students asked, "Are we going to write an essay for Brave New World?

 I told her that I would certainly expect that, when she asked, "Well who is going to score it?"

I don't know. I don't know how the school district can find someone like me who not only knows the rules but knows the books. I don't know how the school district offers that person limited hours at a limited wage and expects to get applicants.

When I started this job, there were readers for every three teachers. Most of those readers were the parents of the teachers or young teachers who had recently left to start families. Now I am the only reader in my district and I have to defend my pay every year. Although Utah has the lowest per pupil expenditure in the nation, the state legislature always tries to limit any increases to school expenses. When the legislature adds money to schools, most of the money goes to supporting departments or programs at the university that can be patented or monetized in some way.

Utah is the far end of the attitude toward education in this country, but it is a symptom of the great malaise that affects us and our children and our future. I am younger than Linda Brown who died this week but that decision affected the view of public schools in this country. That decision turned a majority of white parents against public education, and then against education at all. Currently nearly 50% of Republican voters think that public education and college education are a danger to their culture.

I don't know what the school and teachers will do when I leave. The entire US school system and the parents of the students who go to those schools need to stand up and demand more. Don't get me wrong--the people who currently serve the school unions are not fighting the right battles.