Their stories deserve to bemore than a memory.

I want to tell you about the walk to school, because I suspect when you picture your grandmother as a girl, you picture someone very like yourselves, just smaller and older-fashioned. That isn't quite right. I was born in 1953, and by the time I was walking to school myself, it was 1961—not so very long ago, though I know to you it sounds like the dark ages.

We lived on a farm past the county line, where the roads turned to soup every spring, and the bus only ran along the main road, never bothering to reach our little dirt lane. So I walked, three miles each way, in every kind of weather. I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty about your ride to school. I'm telling you because I loved it, most days, and I want you to have some small piece of it too.

I had a coat I loved more than almost anything I owned—a hand-me-down from my cousin Ruth, wool, the pale blue of a robin's egg, with a tear in the left pocket that my mother patched so many times that by the end it was more patch than pocket. Some mornings I'd tuck a biscuit into that pocket and eat it halfway along my walk, by the old Miller place, where a fence post stood at just the right height for a girl to lean against and catch her breath.

My brother Del walked with me most days, dragging his feet the whole way, having decided early on that he hated arithmetic more than he hated the cold. We went past the frozen creek, past the Millers' barn, past the bend in the road where the wind always found us no matter which way we turned our collars. I remember every one of those mornings more clearly than I remember most of last week.

Our schoolhouse was one room holding every grade at once, run by a woman named Miss Hutchins, who had a spine like a fence post and—though she never let you see it until you'd earned it—a heart like butter. A potbelly stove sat in the corner, and the seats nearest it were worth more to us than anything you own now, I promise you that.

I remember one January when the snow rose so high overnight that Del and I had to break our own trail, taking turns out front so neither of us wore out completely. It took near two hours to reach the schoolhouse door, and when we finally stumbled in, half-frozen, Miss Hutchins never said a word about the lessons we'd missed. She just sat us by that stove and brought us something hot to drink. I don't believe I've felt anything since quite as good as my toes thawing out in that little room.

I think of that walk often now, when I watch you complain, so sweetly and so briefly, about the five minutes your bus runs late. I never say anything. I just smile, and remember the biscuit in my pocket, and think: how lucky I am, that this is the story I get to leave you.