~upon saying "farewell" to both the living and the dead~

Hello everyone on this the 27th day of April, already!  It was only yesterday that I turned the calendar page over from the last day of March and now by mid-week coming next it will be time to flip on over to the beautiful month of May.  At month's end, Mike and I will be headed out to a new life together in Colorado.  Between now and then, there is still much to do and some days I'm not sure how it will all be finished.  But I'm going to stick with it and little by little, things will get crossed off my ever growing "to do" list.  

You know, there's a special place that I wanted to visit before leaving here at the end of the school year and thankfully it is close by me.  I wanted to go and pay my respects to many old friends of mine from the "land of long ago and far, far away".   And so today, I finally made that happen.  Surely glad that I did.

Laurel Cemetery, located between the Reno County, Kansas towns of Haven and Yoder, is a quiet and peaceful place of rest for many folks who have ties to the Haven community.  It's a pastoral kind of setting, nestled among Amish farming ground with fields of wheat all around it.  There is little traffic, save the occasional horse and buggy or steel wheeled tractor that from time to time drives by.  The traffic of Kansas Highway 96, the four-lane that runs between Hutchinson and Wichita and points onward, is about the only sound you will hear.  And even that doesn't seem so bad or disturbing most of the time.  

I've paid many visits to Laurel Cemetery over the years and have always found it quite easy to end up becoming "lost" among the graves.  You know how it is~you go intending to visit just a couple of folks and then before you know it you're out there walking all over the place and finding people that you didn't even realize were there.  As a little kid, Mom and my Grandmother Brown taught me early on in life that going to the cemetery should never be a scary thing, that a visit to a graveyard could actually become a history lesson if you would only listen to the stories that the voices of the dead and the epitaphs on the gravestones would tell.  Decoration Day (what I grew up calling the holiday now referred to as "Memorial Day") was a special time at our house. For weeks in advance, empty tin cans and glass jars were washed and saved to be repurposed as containers for each grave.  Flowers were always rounded up early and I can recall my mom, her sisters, and my grandmother cutting roses, Sweet Williams, peonies, and irises the day beforehand and having iceboxes that smelled of  the most delightful floral scent.  For those of you scratching your heads and wondering about that term "icebox"....well, it's a refrigerator only way more special.  You're just too young to know :)

Today's visit was a memorable one for me and as I walked along the rows and paths of the graves of so very many people that I knew from growing up in Haven, I couldn't help but to be touched by the memories of some pretty remarkable folks.  It was my privilege, my honour to have known them and even though they have been dead and gone from this earth for many years now, I will never forget them or the great influence they had on a quiet and shy young girl named Peggy.   You know, I could probably fill up a thousand pages with the names and stories of all the Haven people, now departed, that influenced me in one way or another.  They were all special to me in their own different ways.  But for now, I wish for you to meet at least some of them and to know a small piece of their story.  They are just seven of many. 

Elisabeth (Betty) Harris was the most wonderful 4th grade teacher a kid could have.  I was blessed to call her "Mrs. Harris" for the 1964-65 school term.  I remember her being kind and loving but also strict when she needed to be.  I can still hear how her voice sounded as she taught all of us kids that year.  It was in her classroom that I learned the importance of paying attention because she would give us "pop quizzes" with a degree of regularity.  I acquired a love for reading and spelling that year and a great disdain for Scholastic Weekly Reader.  She always had a bag of suckers tucked away into her desk drawer and any kid who got a "100" on a test of any kind could always come up to get one as their reward.  She loved us children and we loved her right back.   I was blessed to begin my first year of teaching at Haven Grade School, way back in 1979.  Betty was still there and would continue on for another couple of years.  What a privilege it was to teach alongside her and still continue to learn from her.  Even after she finally retired, I tried to keep in touch as much as I could.  She would have been 81 years of age just a few short months from her death in 1999.

To look at someone's gravestone and see the same year as you were born upon it, is a sobering experience.  This is my friend Bobbie (Venters) Loehr and to me her passing in 2009 was one of my first "wake up" calls of life's brevity on this earth.  I was a couple of weeks older than her and I remember her friendship in the 8th grade and on through high school.  She was a nice girl who grew into a fine woman with children of her own.  The class of 1973, of which both Bobbie and I were from, has already lost 4 of its members by my count.  As kids, you know how it goes.  You are carefree, free spirited, and totally oblivious to just how short sometimes our lives really are.  Only 54 when she died, Bobbie Loehr will be remembered always in the years to come.  I'm glad that she was my friend.

Rex McMurray was my social studies teacher in the 7th and 8th grade, Haven Grade School.  I always liked him but have to admit I really wasn't all that interested in social studies.  That stuff just didn't make any sense, boring at times but I continued to struggle through it.  I would have barely made a "C" in that class if it were not for one special thing~Current Event Fridays.  Every Friday, Mr. McMurray would toss out the lesson plan for the day and just simply talk about the world in its current state of unrest.  I loved current events and thus I LIVED for Fridays and the opportunity they provided to bring my "ailing" social studies grade up to at least a "B".  It was the time of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the unrest of race riots all across the country, and the ever present war in Vietnam.  Mr. McMurray knew how to teach the students in his class about keeping up with what was happening right then and there in time.  I got to teach with Mr. McMurray as well that first year  I came back.  What a great experience to learn from a master teacher about how I could be a better educator.    In the years to come, far into the future, I would help to take care of him when he entered the same care facility that I was working at as a CNA.  He was still sharp as a tack and tall as ever!  He inspired me to keep trying no matter what.  I thank him for that.

Bill Perriman, as far as I am concerned, was a true saint!  This very man and his equally dear wife Irma, opened the doors to their home to any kid who was in the neighbourhood.  Because their daughter Kathy and I were good friends, I spent many a night there throughout high school.  Even with a group of laughing high school girls who were up half the  night instead of sleeping, Bill Perriman never said a word about it.  He told me once, when I asked him how he could stand all of the noise and commotion of us kids being there, that at least he and Irma knew where we all were and the noise was like "peace of mind" to them.  I admired him for that.  I will always remember Bill with fondness for the kind things he did for people, including a little girl like me.

Ida Epperley was the secretary at Haven High School during all of my years there.  She was a wonderful woman who did her job sans technology and an office staff to help her.  I was fortunate to be able to be one of her office aides my junior and senior year and I grew to love her very much.  She always called me "Peg" instead of Peggy and I kind of liked that nickname.  I'm not called that much anymore, but I wouldn't mind if I was.  It was Mrs. Epperley we came to when we wanted to request that the stereo system in the new high school be turned to radio station KEYN.  99 percent of the time, she would oblige our requests and if not, then she had a dang good reason for it.  She loved to hear the Carpenters sing and one Christmas when I gave her their Christmas album, we played it right there in the office.  It was wonderful to see the look of enjoyment on her face as we enjoyed their music together.  Ida helped me to become the woman I grew up to be.  She had a great influence on me and led me to believe that I could do anything I wanted to in life.  I never forgot that about her and surely do give thanks for her to have been a part of my life.

Sergio Albert and Henry Fisher both died within two weeks of one another, American casualties of the war in Vietnam.  It was 1967, the summer of my 12th year and their deaths really shook our small hometown of Haven, Kansas.  My own brother, Mike Scott, was drafted to go to Vietnam as well and I can remember the fear in the eyes of my folks every time a story came on the news about the fighting there.  My brother came home~the little sisters of Sergio and Henry were not so fortunate.  Even though I was very young, the deaths of these two young men had a tremendous impact upon me and shaped my very early opinion of one of the most unpopular conflicts/wars in my time.  Just for the record, I thank all of the men and women who served in Vietnam, those who gave up their lives in one of the most senseless things we have ever been involved in, and those who still carry the "scars" of that war today.  I hate war~but then I can't imagine anyone who doesn't.  I often wonder what they would have been like, had they survived the war.  What wonderful things they both could have given this world of their time and talents.  I've been to those two soldiers' graves dozens of times over the course of the last 46 years.  In my mind, they are frozen in time just like the over 58,000 others that were killed.  I will never forget their ultimate sacrifice in a place far, far away from the peaceful plains of Kansas.


You know, for some reason I have come to take a "liking" to the term farewell.  I never have liked to say good-bye to people or places or things~that word always has such a final connotation about it.  Farewell, on the other hand, is more like saying "Hey, until I see you again, whether that be next month, next year, or maybe even on the "other side" of life, just take care of yourself and be well and at peace".   That would be my wish for all of you reading this blog post.  I desire for all of you, and I'm including myself in that wish, that life would be "ok" and that even when things don't always turn out the way we want them to, they seem to always turn out the way the way they are supposed to.  God bless you guys, one and all.  Have a great rest of this beautiful weekend!

B.J. Honeycutt's final message to Hawkeye Pierce~probably the most poignant of all scenes I believe that I have ever seen on TV.  There was a good reason why they called the last episode of MASH, "Good-bye, Farewell, Amen".