Rural Teachers
- Oct 12
- 3 min read
By Laurie King Billman
We got up on winter mornings to drive down along the frozen Conejos River that
sent out steam as the waters thawed into fog, below mountains covered in snow. We
drove along the old train tracks where I imagined ghost trains came out of the mist silent
as the snowflakes, their smokestacks adding to the silver winter cloud.
Darlene was having some vision issues then but she would still drive every other
day and the roads were slick so our mornings were like a small roller coaster ride
creating adrenaline to get us ready for the wild shit the kids would pull later. When we
passed the little ancient church outside of town, she would cross herself, a motion I
learned to depend on as part of my day. Our work was so hard, we could use some
extra grace.
We were always laughing at some crazy thing a kid had done the day before or
some insult we had endured from our boss who hated us because we were always
laughing. We did this drive for years and became each other’s priests for morning
confessions and each other’s counselors for evening unwinds.
One morning in La Jara the car hit some ice at a stop sign and did a complete
turnaround, and we ended up facing the car behind us. “Christ on a stick,” I said and
“Dios mio,” Darlene cried out, and we both screamed then laughed, and used that event for further jokes during the long months until summer break. In my head I would call it
the La Jara faceoff and would have plenty of those with our boss.
The kids who lived way up the mountain were on the first bus and would be in the
cafeteria eating their breakfast when we got there. Little girls in weather inappropriate
tutus and other sparkle princess garb, little boys in half a dinosaur costume topped with
bear hats—all of them too cute not to hug. Braided and blurry eyed, clutching stuffed
animals, they’d leave their trays for some quick hugs and recaps of the current dramas
of bullying and insults slung out like the barbed arrows of childhood. Some whose pain
would come from home needed longer hugs and would not be able to say their pain so
we would keep an extra strong watch on them.
Then there were the ripped jeans cleavage spilling pissed off teenagers. “Put
your nipples away,” we yelled at them. We would grab a cup of coffee, or, on the days
the New Mexican homemade food vendor made it to our school, we would enjoy the
best tamale in the world, still warm out of her cooler. The hair netted lunch ladies loved
to laugh with us, and would give us a mood report, couched as a weather report, on our
boss who got there early. “Hace frio,” Lupe would say, and Marisol would say “Bad
weather ahead, advisory warning stay clear.” We had elaborate routes to avoid the boss
and on especially bad days would never leave our classrooms.
We watched the children rush like the thawing river into adulthood too soon. At
retirement parties we shared as a community about the long hard and joyous work full
of purpose and frustration our teaching had been. How we loved it in a million ways, the
ways we loved each child. Reached some, lost many.
One lost: the girl who once told me she loved me when I yelled at her for sitting
on a table, who was honored in the city for her achievements at a dress up reception,
making us all proud, who helped raise her six younger siblings with her grandma when
her parents disappeared behind the iron curtain of drug addiction. She started to follow
her mother’s path of drug poisoned ways. She dropped out of college, disappeared. We
wrote Facebook posts with her picture in a short yellow dress among sunflowers. Has
anyone seen Amanda? The caption went up and down the little mountain towns of our
world. We crossed our fingers and prayed. When the worst news came, we cried a river,
felt it freeze over our big teacher hearts that might thaw in the spring, leaving cracked
stones of sorrow, grief, and lost chances.
Laurie King Billman is a poet and essayist. Her written work draws on her life experiences with diverse people and places, as a licensed professional counselor in schools, group homes, and on Native reservations. She’s traveled extensively, from Alaska to Peru, from New Mexico to Kenya. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including McGuffin, Forge, and San Pedro River Review. Originally from Colorado, she now lives in North Carolina.
