~and I say 'thanks' Dad~

The best news of the day so far came with a phone call from the state department of education back home in Topeka.  After about a 3 month wait in time, I found out that my Kansas teacher's license had been renewed for another 5 years.  I'm good to go until 2022 now and still have another 5 years available to me simply by using my teaching experience and my master's degree.  Even though I don't anticipate ever teaching back in Kansas again, that was not the point in it all.  I figured I worked too hard for it in the first place and I would be foolish to just let it go and expire on its own without even trying.

$130 and two fingerprint sessions later, it is now mine to keep once again.

I took the long, long way through college.  After graduating high school in 1973, I should have been able to finish by May of 1977.  Unfortunately that did not happen.   I took a semester off of my senior year in college and that following summer of 1977, as a newly married 21-year old woman went with my father as the cook and errand girl for his summer wheat harvest crew.  I had never ever given any thought to staying out of college for awhile and certainly never entertained the idea of going on a harvest crew either.

Times changed.
I changed with them.

I learned so much that summer about life and of just who I really was.  I went from a young girl who had a closet full of clothes, accessories, and shoes to choose from to one who managed to get by with one pair of tennis shoes and only enough clothes to fit into a medium sized duffel bag.  My dad gave me his best advice about what to take with me in 8 little words.

"Don't pack much.  There's no room for it."
And so I didn't.
For the record, I survived.

I returned to school in the spring of 1978 taking enough classes to catch up from the ones that I missed out on by going on the harvest.  By then it was apparent that I'd need another year before all of my credits would allow me to earn my teaching degree.  It was a sobering experience to realize that I could have already been done had I stuck with it instead of traveling with my father's harvest crew.  In my heart though I knew that I had done the right thing by going along to help, and so I just stayed with it until I had enough credits to graduate by May of 1979.

Now all of these many years later, here I am still teaching and not all that far from where my father used to traipse up and down the Great Plains of America.  I'm less than 50 miles away here in Burkburnett from the towns of Davidson and Frederick, Oklahoma.  Those were the first two stops in the wheat harvest of 1977.  Little did I know where my life would take me many years and several miles down the road into the future.

Yes, I took the long way through college and when I walked across the stage that cloudy day in late May of 1979 to receive my diploma, my father was there to see it.  I remember how we both hugged each other after it was all over and how I cried tears of joy that it was finally finished.  3 years later, we would bury my father in a little cemetery near the town of Halstead, Kansas.  I will always be thankful for many things and one of them is this.

I'm glad that I invested a summer of my lifetime to join him on the road.
It was time well spent.
It was time not wasted.
It helped me to become the woman that I am today.
Thanks, Dad.

He was the finest man I ever knew.  I'm so glad that out of all the daddies out there, God chose him to be mine.  I love him still and will always be John Scott's little girl.