It is spring. Today the windows are open and the wind whispers through the screens, setting the drapes all a-dance.
And just that quick, I am blown back to the late 1950s, sitting in Miss Landoc’s English class in John Mills Grammar School in Elmwood Park, Il.
That old brick school had tall windows reaching all the way up to the high ceilings, and when winter had finally loosened its grip, Miss Landoc would bid one of us to take the long wooden pole with the iron hook at the end, and with it to unclip the latch at the top of each window to let in the wind, kissed by the scent of the mud-luscious world. Children who learn in air-conditioned schools where winter and spring smell alike will never know such ecstasy.
It was spring at last. The sameness of each winter day was over. And the loamy wind willed us to wonder: “What next? What next?”
Miss Landoc was a lady in the most Victorian sense of that word. Her classroom had white lace drapes hanging from ceiling to floor that would dance as each window was pulled open. They would swirl around her as she sat at her desk, and she would have one of us pull them aside and tie them back so they wouldn’t be torn.
And with the drapes pulled back, we could see the elegant rough architecture of the oaks lining the alley behind the school, their black boughs studded with early buds. It was one more gift that spring had brought us, for Miss Landoc knew that oaks outside the window — even in winter — held a force of fascination that no grammar rule or punctuation lesson could overcome.
And so the drapes were kept closed all through the school year, to fix our attention on the business at hand.
Except when the wind whispered through the spring-sprung windows.
The gaping windows and the swirling drapes were a sure sign that summer was on its way, when we would become free-range children once more, spilling out of the house early each morning to run gym-shoe free in the world, returning just this side of feral by dinner time.
Springtime squirrels scampered on those black oak branches over the alley, chittering gymnasts whose stunts both amused and amazed. With each leap and twist, our hearts cheered them, willing them to even more spectacular feats, wondering “What next? What next?”
But we watched them slyly, like burglars or spies, for if Miss Landoc noticed that our attention was divided from that day’s gerund or preposition, she would pull the windows shut and close the drapes once more.
And so, as the squirrels cavorted, I would snap my eyes obediently to hers whenever she looked my way, nodding in rapt attention to whatever lesson she was droning. But whenever she glanced to Kenny Ellis on one side of the room, or to Joe Paladino on the other, my eyes would stray back to the circus in the oaks.
For whatever gaps that bedeviled my early schooling, I have those squirrels to blame — and to thank.
At times it would seem they were playing, as three or four of them swirled like smoke around trunk and limb, startling the others into leaping and chasing once more.
And then it would seem they were fighting, as two of them wrestled on a stout branch, until one of them seemed to get an upper hand by climbing on the other’s back.
And then, it seemed, they were doing something altogether different.
We had no idea what their new antic meant, but it was silly enough to make us elbow-poke each other and snigger until Miss Landoc turned to look, and then rise from her seat at her desk.
Proper Victorian ladies knew when it was time to pull the drapes and shut the windows once more.
By late May the buds would swell to leaves, and the squirrels’ routines would change. Now, just as our school work was about to turn to summer play, the windows could open once more, for the squirrels had traded antics for industry. They would work at pulling the new greenery into a brown, bulging nest of drying leaves and sticks.
And gradually, we would start to understand the meaning of their intimate April dance on the oak branch.
We boys would snigger about it. And when we sniggered the girls would blush about it — but they would snigger about it, too, when they huddled together and didn’t know we were watching them.
But we were watching them.
Wondering: “What next? What next?”
Anyway, that was a long time ago — more than a half-century. Miss Landoc has gone where all Victorian ladies had gone before. John Mills Grammar School, though still standing, is air-conditioned now. The oaks, too, are gone, felled by a parking lot. The squirrels — and their babies’ babies’ babies — now scamper elsewhere.
But today my windows are open, for it is spring once more. The drapes are all a-dance, and I stand among them with a cup of coffee in hand, recalling Miss Landoc and her lacy drapes and the squirrels dancing on the budding boughs behind her — with nothing left of any of them but the wind.
Wondering: “What next? What next?”
• Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
