Hoo, boy.

So, as fellow veterans of Extremely Rural School Environments may be aware, in the real boonies, you find schools which have two traits:

First, because the population density is so low, it's often economically impractical to have separate elementary, middle/junior, and high schools - so you end up with K-through-Twelve all in the same building. (There's a school in my home county where that will often all fit in the same classroom, kept open because it's simply too far to bus the kids to another facility.)

Second, because all the families have lived in the area since Time Immemorial, everybody is related to, if not quite everybody else, at least to somebody.

Now, I went to such a school.

And my parents are both natives of a completely different state. With no relatives in the area.

This presented certain social challenges, but the worst challenge, as clarified by my parents' stories, was the staff.

Y'see, I wandered through my father's shelf of WW2 history books, and found one that looked interesting, which I then picked up and spent the next... month or two? Reading.

In first grade.

At one or two different points, I had teachers ask me what the book was about. And I stared at them in wide-eyed terror, because 'explain? In, like, words? To a person?'.

At which point they concluded that the only reason I was carrying the book was pretend that I was actually smart, since obviously I couldn't possibly actually be reading it, and that I was a lousy little liar who needed to be treated as one.

I was quite pathetically grateful when, between third and fourth grades, we moved into town and I was able to go to a different school. I adored my fourth grade teacher, a tiny little waif of a woman whose name I can remember but have no hope of spelling, enough that, all through fifth grade, I would stop by on the way out of the building to give her a hug before I went home - just because she was fair and that was such a nice change.

I learned just a couple of hours ago that she had died of cancer while I was in High School.

So... I guess rambling about it on the internet helps me work that feeling out.

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"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."