First Grade Leaf Art

Description: 

Sheet of dark construction paper, might have been black or a very dark brown. My name is written in crayon the top. There are the impressions of six leaves, three maples in orange and three oak in yellow, made with tempera paint.

Story:

It was another first grade art project with Mrs. Kemp. We took leaves and sat them carefully in tempera paint and then applied them to the paper and lifted up the leaf. The trick was to have enough paint that you can see the shape and some of the vein work but avoid blobs.  I think I did OK. The white crayon at the top with my name looks like my own first grade handwriting. My mother kept it in a file for years and then somewhere in my adulthood gave me the file with the art work and all my report cards and some other bits she kept. I know it was pre-fire because there is some soot marks on the edge. I’m guessing it was in a file folder still when I pulled it out of the house. There are old tape marks on the back. I don’t think I ever hung it up, but I think we had a large display of these on our classroom wall for a parents night event.  

Geometry constructions

Description:  

Typing paper (that was a thing) cut to squares with black and white stars: one six-point, one five-point. Made using a compass and a straight edge. I also have a few papers ripped out of my geometry notebook explaining the basic method to make them.   

Story:

The notebook pages are mine, and while I really enjoyed that unit of geometry in high school, I was not nearly as talented as my sister Sarah who made a lot of these drawings and carefully inked them in. I liked to fill my bedroom wall with all sorts of things (the bulletin board was not enough), and so I put them up with masking tape -thus after thirty plus years the acid has bled through. Even the coloring in with the black fine point pen is more carefully done than I have patience for. My sisters and I all had the same teachers and from 7th to senior year at St. Thomas math was taught by Mrs. Hollis. 

Most of the geometric art you can see in the picture is Sarah's work. If you can zoom in you can see that the big orange poster is a spiral of a rectangle. It was an assignment to pick a polygon and make a spiral. Sarah had suggested I do the rectangle, so that is the one bit of geometric art on my walls that was mine.

Coca-cola can

Description: 

Coca-cola classic can with original formula seal.  Under the ingredients “CANNED UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE COCA-COLA COMPANY, ATLANTA GA. BY COCA-COLA BOTTLING COMPANY WEST, INC., BISMARCK, N.D.58501 AND GREAT FALLS, MT. 59401. The copyright is "1986 THE COCA-COLA COMPANY”  There is some soot damage on it.

Story:

When I was in the fifth grade I was in a group called Acro.  We were an acrobatic tumbling group that would perform halftime at high school boys basketball games.  Not as impressive as a gymnastics team or the Fargo Acro team that used mini tramps and looked to be flying.  Ours was much more rudimentary and, to be honest (most of the others started in the 1st grade and I started in the 4th) I was not really good at it. But we did not compete and were not scored and so my lack of talent did not offend anyone and I felt free to keep trying.  However, I was naturally flexible. 

In the 5th grade our coach, Mrs. Barker, challenged us to develop the ability to do the splits and offered to buy a can of pop for anyone who learned to do the splits before she did.  Pop was not a daily feature of my life. (Being a Wisconsin girl now I want to type "soda" but in my Dakota days it was "pop" so I’m writing "pop" for this account.) Once a week on Friday we were given the privilege of having one glass of pop from my Father's supply.   Apart from that and from visits to grandparents in Winnipeg, if we wanted a can of pop, we had to spend our own money.  I think in 1983 the cost was 35 cents out of the vending machines by the gym.  My weekly allowance was 25 cents. Anyway the promise of a pop was enough to encourage me to work on my stretching each night and well before our first performance I was able to do the splits.  The thing is, I never got my can of pop.  She kept forgetting to get it for me. 

Now St Thomas Public School was a small school in a small town, so my grade school acro coach was my junior high language arts and phy ed instructor.  She also taught girls high school physical education.  I would, on occasion, remind her that she owed me a can of pop.  We would get dressed for gym class in high school and she would tell us to warm up by stretching and I’d slowly slide into the splits in front of her and say “you know, I’m kind of thirsty.”   No one else had taken her up on the challenge or at least no one ever made a point of expecting her to make good on her promise.  My senior year in the spring she asked me what my favorite pop was. I told her it was Coca-Cola Classic. (New Coke was still a thing.)  She filed that away and on awards night my senior year she added one award that was not in the program and presented me with a 12 pack of Coca-Cola.  

My classmate, Terry Mattson, asked if he could have one and I refused. Well, he asked for one and I offered to trade him for one of his many sports trophies, so technically he refused. For years I had lamented the fact that all my awards consisted almost entirely of certificates and ribbons and I had earned this.  Metals and trophies elluded me. My plan was to save the first can and make a base for it and fashion my own trophy out of it.  I cleaned it and left it on the counter, but Mom figured it was trash and tossed it out.   I was angry, but it's not like I didn't have a replacement for it, so the can pictured here is the second one from that 12 pack. I never mounted it.  Not sure where it was in our spare room, but it survived my house fire and here it is part of the only award I ever received for a sports-like activity.