In second grade I had Mrs. Cuff. She loved poetry. She would let us color and would put the record Where The Side Walk Ends on by Shel Silverstein. I loved listening to him tell his poem stories. His voice would reach such a pitch it gave me goose bumps. She was the best teacher. She had big thick brown glass frames and short brown hair to match. Mrs. Winslow who taught fifth grade science was her sister and I really hoped I got her for my teacher in fifth grade if she was anything like her sister Mrs. Cuff.

I was always one step behind in class. In second grade there are always a lot of instructions and steps and I often did them backwards or skipped steps. This is when I learned to look on with my friend Deliilah or Lila who sat next to me in class. I realized Lila always knew what was going on in school.

I first met Lila the night she moved to the rental house on our farm. They hadn’t put the beds together yet so they asked if Delilah could spend the night. Everyone else called her Lila because that’s how her sister pronounced her name, but her parents always called her Delilah her Dad would say. Since we were outside we started looking for toads and we found one. It peed on me. We thought this was hysterical. We laughed all night long. We slept next to each other and had pushed my sister’s bed next to mine since Suze was at her friend Beth’s for the night. It seemed everything I said was hilarious and Lila kept tooting everytime she laughed which made us both laugh even harder. We didn’t get much sleep that first night but man was it a funny night. We were only seven and everything was funny back then.