The Reindeer Keeper

I'm not sure if this is the one-room schoolhouse my mother and a few of her sisters attended before it was closed and they went into the nearby city to school and I don't know how old they were when they made the switch. I do know they graduated from the Catholic high school which has since been torn down and is now the sight of the local fire department. The one-room schoolhouse they attended was up the road from where they lived-down a side road just as it curved by a bunch of maples. The creek that ran behind their farmhouse ran behind the school as well. The school is long gone but the maples are still there. Sometimes I go down that old country road. I slow down before that turn; imagining exactly where that school sat and imagining my mother and her sisters walking along that very road. If this is the school-then this is where my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents bought the desks, books, and chalkboards for me and my cousins for our chicken coop clubhouse. Lo

By the time my cousins and siblings and I came along our grandparents' farm was not a working farm. Everything was left as it had been when the barn was full of cows and horses; chickens and pigs. There were still some stray feathers in the roosts. Empty milk cans sat unused. Stanchions sat idle. Most days when the bus would bring us home from school my brother would walk up the road to a nearby farm and help out. He was a hard worker. He was also a neat freak-the total opposite of me! I remember sneaking into his room to look at his stamp collection. It was so organized; as were his school notebooks and closet.  A couple of times he bought a few heifers and kept them in the barn. One time it was black angus. It was fun having animals in the barn. I could only imagine what it must have been like back in the day when the farm was up and going. I think our grandfather would have been proud of my brother who was the first grandchild. They were quite close. My brother inherited his