[12/1/21]

[The holiday season brings with it nostalgia, childhood memories of Christmas, snow, sleigh-riding and ice-skating, hot chocolate, mittens drying on the radiator. And memories of elementary school, for me especially long-ago art and music classes as the holidays approached. Here’s a poem I wrote a year ago of a memory from 3rd grade art class that sticks with me. ____________

Telling Miss Low

In third grade art class, Miss Low, I couldn’t tell you that the reason you sent Sally and me to the principal for laughing so hard we cried, was your flowered shower cap.

We held long as we could, the giggles that ached our ribs and spurted from our mouths, but every day it rained or snowed, a shower cap pulled over your curly red hair did us in.

The Christmas cards you brought for us to copy that day still shine in my mind—the horse-drawn sleigh on the farmhouse driveway, green boughs bent under heavy snow.

But mostly I remember your corkscrewed hair poking out under the elastic edges of your shower cap as you bent over our desks, praising our simple barns and hills.

© 2020 Penny Harter