Back in the early 1940s kids didn’t need to pay as much attention to wintertime calendar dates as broadly as they are required to today. Seasons, such as fall, winter and spring, were properly identified for their dated holidays but were not as widely observed.

The school year was more often than not thought of as a time of mud, snow, and mud again; something to get through with until summer was back.

I should know. Our farm, south of Iowa City, lay sprawled out on the tail end of the well-known Indian Lookout Hill location, more specifically in two separate, but back to back, townships.

At that time, our state’s officials in charge of educational rules determined that country schools should be located within, no more or less than, one mile of distance between each school, and with only one in each township.

That made me eligible to attend two schools because our duel family-owned farm joined us, in two separate houses, and in two neighboring districts.

The hitch, and there is always a hitch, depended on which of the two homes I was living in to determine which school I could or should attend. Because we moved out and back in, twice, for unrelated reasons, I was able to attend both schools—but at different times. Of course, there was always the matter of the mud roads to deal with, no matter where or when that was.

My major concern in all those years was mostly with the seasons of January, February, and March, known basically as times of mud, snow and (again) mud.

I learned from my on-site experiences in those years that the mud on one side of Indian Lookout Hill was sandy and on the other side sticky. But I was convinced our place was rooted in the fact that China was at its depth source, undetermined only by my repeatedly failed digging attempts to reach the bottom. Keep in mind I was only eight or nine and still in the learning stages.

I carried a lot of mud on my 4-buckle overshoes from our driveways to each of the schools I was required to travel to because of that state ruling, and we were always living at the furthest away location. I also learned in later years that mud deposited along the sidewalks never encouraged flowers to grow there. (Just thought I should include that learned fact at this point.)

In one particular venture, walking in those days to Highway 218 (now 965), my mother and I (then 12 years old and not a good ‘mudder’), were on our way to an invited-to party of sorts. She was walking ahead of me in mud, the thickest we had ever seen, and I was struggling along behind her trying to step into the same places she had been when we both fell down.

No, you don’t want to know what we had to say to each other, but take it for a fact that some times life can get so tough it proves to you that you are really related to each other in ways you never knew possible.