Hitting the Dirt . . . Again

It’s been almost one month since I took the kids hiking for The Banana’s birthday and fell down a flight of stone steps on the hiking trail, scraping all the skin off my lower legs and bruising my knees. Those wounds have healed very nicely.

On Friday afternoon, in the middle of, well, a terrible day, I volunteered in the library at Sarah’s school. Let me tell you for a minute how much I love volunteering at the school library. When the volunteer sheets came home at the beginning of the school year, I was amazed at all the different opportunities there were to volunteer at the school. In my mind, PTA volunteering meant things like serving food at the PTA meetings, or selling raffle tickets, but no, there were oodles of literacy volunteer oportunities! And I was thrilled. I am a disaster with food. I am the worst salesperson who ever trod down the sidewalk, but literacy! I can do literacy! I saw the opportunity to volunteer at the library and I gave a little gasp! I especially adore libraries. I have marvelous memories of working two summers at the library at Jamestown College. And so I could not resist signing myself up for bimonthly volunteering at the school library.

And I have been having a FANTASTIC time! Whenever my husband is home on a Friday afternoon, I go the the school and check in books for students, and check out books for students. I shelve stacks of books as I listen to the media specialists do a fantastic job teaching kids, who pretty much remarkably give them rapt attention. I go about my business in awe of the media specialists, their smartboards (an amazing technological feat for the field of education) and best of all, their own personal voice amplication microphones that they use so they don’t have to raise their voices to get students’ attention (where were those when I was teaching?) And I cannot help but to bask in the satisfying beep of the barcode scanner next to the librarian computer, the quiet orderliness of the dewey decimel system and the careful attention it demands for numerical sequence, the gleaming children’s fiction books waiting patiently on shelves in alphabetical perfection. It is a great place for me to be.

Anyway, back to the story. I usually walk the two miles or so to the school. The first mile is a regular sidewalk walk down a moderately steep hill. For the last mile, I usually choose my favorite hiking trail which ends up across the street from the school. I was toodeling down the hiking trail, enjoing the amazing fall foilage, the gushing stream tumbling over rocks and down moderately sized waterfalls. And suddenly, true to my noncoordinated fashion, my ankle twisted underneath me for no apparent reason at all, and I found myself sprawled out onto the hiking trail on my stomach. My shirt and mittens were muddy. My jeans were sliced on a rock and the gashes on my knee were slowly soaking into the soft denim. (And I had JUST bought those jeans!).

I didn’t have time to walk back and change, so I just kept going and after signing in at the secretary’s desk in the school office, I made a little trip to the school nurse’s office (I haven’t seen a school nurse in almost 20 years, I think) to collect a few bandaids. When I finally made it to the library, I apologized for my crazy appearance to the media specialist, who being true to the nature of a good librarian took it all in stride and didn’t really care at all. Glorious, I tell you. If teaching music were not so exciting, I would look seriously into becoming a librarian. It’s the ultimate vacation from taking care of preschoolers.