lester

connected meanderings
2005-08-16 16:52:28 (UTC)

1. One-Half Mile North of Highway Ten

This will connect with my childhood home on the farm that
was one half mile north of Highway 10 in Wisconsin,
roughly half across the state. I'll tell how this highway
and expressway 80 have both repeatedly figured in my life.
Highway ten took us west to Neillsville and east to
Marshfield the two cities of my childhood, one 4000 in
population then and now and the other 18,000 then and now,
possibly a mite large since it's the home of the
Marshfield Clinic, an extensive medical center. Then for
college, I went further east on the same highway, 50
miles, and gained my 3 years there. The college literally
was on the highway and my girlfriend, later wife (1960),
lived just two blocks north of the highway. The two of us,
after 15 years of marriage left New York and New Jersey
where we'd grown to know Interstate 80, then traveled for
a decade to Fargo, N.D., also on Highway 10, where we
lived a couple of miles north of it. But I get ahead of my
story.

I was in fact born in 1938 in a a house on County Trunk K,
the same highway that goes through Granton, Wisconsin, but
a few miles north. My father at the time taught a rural
grade school, named Merry Vale, though I don't really
believe it was in a valley nor was it all that merry. No
somber, but in those days one didn't question such things,
that was simply the name. Later I went to high school in
Granton, which was 1 and a quarter miles directly west of
my farm home so I went to school walking oin the railway
tracks.

This will cover walking on highway 10 to my grade school,
the Sunbeam School, grades one through eight. First I had
to get to the highway and when 6 to adolescents such trip
seemed to take forever. I was home schooled for grade one,
already having learned to read, so I'm told, from
traipsing around my father's feet as he corrected papers.
I got 100% on the county test, but then went to school
(avidly desired) for the second grade on. During the first
year (there being no school bus), I rode with the milkman,
Flukey Reisner, as he did his route on the road just one
mile north of highway 10, overshooting the school east by
a mile and then returning, with my job to walk the
remainder of the way to the school, about a quarter mile.




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