It was one of those days. . . . There just seemed to be something strange in the air. First we arrived at school to find the air conditioning was completely shut down and wouldn’t turn back on. So, we called the school board and opened up a few windows.
Next, it was one of the students’ birthdays, so I had tied a helium balloon to her chair. It came untied and got batted around loudly by a ceiling fan, becoming completely wrapped all around the fan. While a gentleman was up on a ladder unwrapping the balloon. . . .
In came two older brothers of a few of our students . . . with a skunk. Now, it was a baby skunk, and it didn’t smell too much. I think because it had sprayed one of the brothers the night before and run out of spray.
By this time, whatever was wrong with the air conditioner was evidently pretty bad, so two more air conditioning men had joined the first air conditioning man and they were going through the school with pipes and wrenches, climbing up in the attic . . . and stopping to see the skunk. . . and then telling us skunk stories.
Shortly after this, there was a loud crash as the wind from one of the open windows blew over a framed photograph, and glass shattered all over the floor.
Next, because it was a balmy, humid day, the flies were out. And they seemed to really like our school. (Maybe they smelled the skunk?) They were everywhere, flying in through the open windows. Some of the students began swatting the flies with their rulers. I grabbed my fly swatter and helped, and then fed the dead flies to the fish. There were so many I stopped counting them, and the fish stopped eating them.
Then it was time for the birthday girl’s party. At morning break we all headed out to the picnic tables for donuts and chocolate milk, and . . . to watch large cotton tail rabbits running across the highway (possibly because of the heavy rains the night before), and to see the students play with crawdads they found in the puddles out in ball field. What could happen next? Well . . . .
While we were finishing up our donuts, four huge wide load trucks were trying to turn around in the little bitty picnic rest stop across from our school.
Of course it was quite a sight, and the day had been such a fiasco already, so we let the students run across the field to watch when . . . one of the big trucks got stuck in the mud, and then another one of the huge wide load trucks had to pull it out.
It was a very peculiar day.