In School

Many of my earliest memories take place at the White House Preschool in Sudbury, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up. This is not just because it is the school I attended from the age of 2 to 4 but because it is also the school my mother worked at when I was very young, during the period in my life that my own girls are in now.

The White House Preschool, so-called because the school consisted of a little white house adjacent to the public high school, for which it was a lab school, was a very comfortable home-away-from-home for me and my sister. We went there as students, yes, but speaking for myself I felt a sense of ownership, of intimacy with it. When I was there after hours while my mother was working I would often curl up in my favorite spot from my own in-school hours: the raised reading nook lined with carpeting that had to be reached with a little ladder. Nooks are very important for preschool-age children, I think. I knew the pantry intimately, that was for sure--on which shelf the goldfish crackers I liked were kept, the cookies for special occasions, the juice. I knew that the upstairs was sometimes forbidden, a little mysterious. It was an attic floor where the staff offices were, as well as a long jam-packed supply room, where we, and the daughters of my mother's best friend and colleague, could lie and color or read if we were "home" sick from school, once we'd left and gone on to actual school.

I logged a lot of hours at this school. Although my mother wasn't technically working full-time, she'd left her first grade teaching job to have more time while we were small, my mother's not really a part-time kind of a teacher. Or a part-time kind of an anything. So when she worked, and we weren't otherwise occupied, we went to her school, too.

I've just been thinking about why I feel so at home in schools, why they feel so comfortable to me. More on this to come...and I'm leading up to something, I promise.