once upon a time...
The school across from my childhood home has been painted. I remember when it was painted last time. I don't remember how old I was, except that I was too young to go to school there. I think memories of that summer are among the first that I have.
I watched as the school was sand blasted. My mother held my hand so I didn't get too close and get any on me. It was very loud. I couldn't understand why they were using water, if they were 'sand blasting' the old paint away. It was very messy. I wanted to climb on the scaffolding the painters were using, but my mother held on very tight. When the men were done sandblasting, they left fora few days. The sand was still there, but all the water they used had dried up. There was sand left in every nook and cranny, but it wasn't like beach sand, or the sand in the sand box. It felt strange when you held it, almost like it was dirty or something. They didn't clean up after themselves like they should have.
Before the strange with the watery sand came back, you could pull the shingles off the school, because they were so loose. Misty and Tiffinay and I used to try to see who could get the biggest one. They always got bigger pieces than me.
I sat at the dinner table one warm summer night with the front door open so I could watch the painters work their magic. It didn't seem to take long for the school to transform from ugly brown bare wood (with some white parts that refused to let go) into ugly pastel yellow, with bright red trim. I wish I had a picture of the school to share, so you could see just how ugly it was.
Most of the school became yellow. The kind of ugly yellow that my mother always made me wear to church, saying how lovely I looked in my best clothes. The trim around the windows was painted bright red. It wasn't as bright as a stop sign, or a fire engine, but it was bright. I think it was chosen specifically to clash with the yellow shingles. The school had two grand staircases, which were both painted in that god-awful shade of red, turning the school into a beast with bloody legs. Nobody used those entrances. It was a big school, and they only painted the half with shingles.
The other part was an addition that happened just before we moved it. They left it cinderblock grey. The new part looked just like a prison you see on television. The gymnasium didn't even have any windows in it, just four doors, which never opened. It looked like some sort of mystery building, always bigger on the inside than the outside appeared.
Painting on top of the sand might have been a good thing. It gave all the stairs and hand railings some grittiness when you walked on it. Sitting on any part of the school was painful, and if you happened to slip on the steps, you were bound to hurt yourself.
When I started grade one, there was a bit of a playground on one side of the school. There wasn't anything to do on the other side. It was just a big open field. The playground had a slide, and three "things" to climb on. There was also a merry-go-round, but it was cemented into the ground. They should have called it a merry-go-motionless. I never got to ride on the merry-go-nowhere, some kid fell off and hurt herself before I was old enough to hurt myself. I wonder if I should thank that kid.
The school was two or three floors tall, depending on which part you were in. The old part was very tall. The ground floor was where the bathrooms, furnace room, and a storage room were kept. Above that were the older kids classes, and the principals office, and the library. There was a teachers room, but I didn't go near it. It smelled funny. The library was very high off the ground, and the stairs to get into it from outside the school were very tall. We used to play in and under the wood frame stairs on one side of the school, and bounce a ball off the concrete stairs on the other side.
