Mrs. Foree

I’m pretty sure every kid has had a teacher that they were sure was not from this planet. The type you learn to expect in college…a little eccentric, very vocal with their beliefs, constantly pushing the envelope asking the class to consider topics a little bit broader than what was originally expected. My junior high science teacher, Mrs. Foree, was that teacher for me.

Anytime the weather gets out of whack like it has this past week, my sisters and I look at each other and whisper “Mrs. Foree”. We use soft, breathy, scared voices you hear in horror movies, when the heroine is getting ready to be killed by the mutants. We whisper because we’re scared that the teacher we all laughed at in junior high was right.

Before global warming was cool, before green was something bigger than a color, there was Mrs. Foree. She ruled over her Oklahoma classroom. She loved rocks. Her lab counters were littered with piles of rock. Big rocks. Big rocks that she would chuck at you if you weren’t paying attention. Throwing rocks was something all the kids knew to expect when it was their turn to sit in Mrs. Foree’s class. And for the most part they only came hurling at you when you were caught not paying attention to her theory on the seasons.

Basically she declared that in a very short time we wouldn’t have any more seasons. No more spring. No more fall. We would simply transition from one harsh summer to the next brutal winter in a day or possibly even during the same day. It was Mrs. Foree that I thought of yesterday morning when Fez, the wonder-puppy and I walked outside at 4:30 a.m., for a morning walk and retrieval of that “other paper”. I thought of Mrs. Foree because I was dressed in long pants, a sweatshirt, heavy coat, gloves and a hat – pretty much the same outfit that I wore the evening before when the two of us patrolled the hill looking for renegade squirrels. The temperature Monday evening was around 30 degrees, with a light rain. My winter weather gear was perfect for those conditions.

Yesterday morning, I felt like a pop-tart in a toaster oven standing outside in my front yard, cooking in all those clothes with a rather balmy 60 degree breeze gently blowing across my nose – the only part of my face exposed to the “elements”. Mrs. Foree was right, I thought. By the time I reached my office at 7:30 a.m., the temperature had dropped into the low 40s. We were back to winter in less than two hours.

I don’t know what happened to her or even if she’s still alive. But I’m never going to consider the weather the same way I once did…and I may just take up juggling…rocks, big rocks.