The Reindeer Keeper

  The other day I stopped at an Amish farm I’d driven by many times. It had nothing to do with their roadside stand. It was because an Amish woman at another roadside stand told me that one of the three Amish men on their local school board lived there. She told me this after I voiced my curiosity about Amish schools. I explained I liked to write stories. Some for children. Some for adults. I told her I had an idea for a new storyline which included an Amish community. A particular character was the Amish teacher. I asked her if it would be possible for me to visit an Amish school. That’s when she told me about that Amish farm where that Amish man on the school board lived. I never did tell her I had been wanting to visit an Amish school for years. New storyline or not. So, the other day when I finally stopped at that Amish farm, the Amish man on the school board was home. He was more than kind. A half hour later I was parking my car off the road, in front of the Amish school I had...

My love of chalkboards goes back to when I was growing up in the country and playing in the chicken coop clubhouse that had been gutted and filled with the remains of a one-room schoolhouse. This included the books, desks and one chalkboard. That's where the love affair began. It's where my cousin and I turned our imaginations up full speed and when we did it most always included using our chalkboard. That was especially true when playing school. Our pretend students would be called up one-by-one to fill in the answers to math problems or to draw shapes or to spell words or to connect a stick drawing to the matching word. If we were playing Cowboy, the chalkboard would tell tired passengers stopping at our pretend restaurant what the specials were for the day. It also gave the arrival and departure times of the pretend stagecoach. If we were teaching art the chalkboard, sitting on top of a small stool so we'd be able to reach it, was on overload. Intrigue of chalkboard...