Schoolhouse

The summer I was nine or ten, my father bought a country schoolhouse.  It wasn’t unusual for my dad to purchase oddball things — a defunct ice cream shop or a stash of World War Two helmets — but this was a stretch. I was delighted. I imagined going  there, sitting and reading at an old wooden desk in a Little House on the Prairie one-room frame schoolhouse, pretending to be one of the pigtailed girls who had walked through the woods and meadows to attend classes there.  I begged to see it and finally he agreed to take me. The fact that my dad figured he could eventually turn it into a storage facility for his business should have been my clue — Imagine my disappointment when I saw a huge, hulking two story brick structure in a state of great disrepair, with a variety of fish hooks strewn around the floors inside. It hadn’t been a school in many years and its most recent incarnation had been a fish hook facility of some sort. As is often the case, imagination is sweeter than reality.