A Sweet and Sour Autumn

After the cool, windy days that signalled the end of our New Mexico summer, September 30, 2013 was a beautiful, sunny, warm autumnal day.

Over breakfast Dee told me about her grade-school days, when she and her family lived deep in the wooded Ozark Mountains of southwestern Missouri. She attended a one-room school, and the teacher, likely recruited from the graduates of a local high school, would arrive early to ready the room, draw water for her thirsty charges from the well, and, in winter,...