a garage full of old school maps

18 July 2012

Waaayyyy back at the beginning of the summer, an old school that had closed was having a yard sale.
Why does it make me sad to see old schools close, even though there was a brand new, fancy, technological one to replace it? The flag in the window of the empty classroom just kind of put a lump in my throat…

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There was a line already before 8 a.m.:school sale 1


Overhead projectors are a thing of the past!school sale


and look at these cool drafting stools that I picked up just because, and then ended up getting rid of because they weren’t really sturdy and I really didn’t have a place for them. Am I crazy?school sale 3

And THEN….I was asking a kind lady if they had any old pull down maps because I had been wanting one for my boys’ room, and she said, “YES, I do…but they aren’t here. Could you give me your number and I will call you when we are at the other school and you can come look? So, of course I did and the MORNING that we were leaving on vacation, she called and said I could come over.

Uhhhhh…."I need to run grab some snacks for the trip and run a quick errand. Be right back nice, patient family!”

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I didn’t want to take the time to unroll each map, (because remember I was picking up snacks for the trip) so she asked if I wanted to take them all. Otherwise, they would go in the dumpster. I couldn’t have THAT, soooooo I asked “how much?”

And she asked how much change I had, and I scrounged up .90
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And, so she wrote up a receipt for 90 cents and I loaded them up, and now my garage is full of maps.

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And we have had fun unrolling them, and let me tell you, the smell of those maps have led me down memory lane, back to Mrs. Tremper’s 4th grade classroom. Tracing the Oregon trail in our groups in front of the class, the memory of putting a wet paper towel on the thermostat to trick it into heating our room up, and chewing saltines for 1 minute when we were talking about how saliva aids in digestion (I still think about that every time I eat a saltine…one minute is a LONG time to chew on a saltine) and dissecting a petunia, and Justin that just moved from Arkansas that told the funniest stories in his southern drawl about the big black dog that sat on his front porch, and reading Little House on the Prairie in class, but being really bored because I had already read it 37 times on my own, so I dreamed of Almanzo Wilder on the tv show instead.

Soooo…what am I going to do with them? I’m starting to pin ideas here. What do you think??

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