Retrospect: East Dalhousie

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor recalls a situation from elementary school.

Back in the Annapolis Valley, the elementary school I attended had an enrollment of around 700, as I recall. I think ten school buses might have served it: I can picture them lined up in the long driveway outside at day’s end.

Back then, I overheard a fellow student saying she met her bus in the morning at perhaps around 7:30 am. Since the first bell in the morning, I think, was 8:40am, meeting the bus that early was a concept I found hard to imagine. At the same time, she was a farmer, and farm kids generally were truthful, especially about geographic ideas. Therefore, I believed her.

I always walked to school, and lived about a kilometre away. It was easy for me to get there in ten minutes, and possible in five minutes, so I don’t think I got up before 7:50am. I left for school around 8:30am.

I just looked up East Dalhousie on Google, where it seems to say that it’s 45 minutes from there to Kingston. Therefore, it’s easy to imagine, now, that she would have met the bus around 7:30am for it to arrive around 8:30am at the school.

Other people’s contexts can be so different from one’s own.