Read Online A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary - Free Book Online

were thin and easy to hold. I buried my face in the pages, inhaling the new-book smell, eager to join other children in reading from them.
    The day after Labor Day, Mother walked me the six blocks to the two-story red brick Fernwood Grammar School, where I joined a confusion of children from the first through the eighth grades. Mother left me with other first-graders in the basement, where teachers lined us up, two by two. Clutching our books, tablets, and pencil boxes, we were all excited and bewildered.
    Someone blew a whistle and called out, “Mark time!” Imitating other children, I pumped my knees up and down. “March!” Led by the first-grade teacher and still pumping our knees, we marched up the stairs to our classroom, where we were each assigned one of forty desks in five rows of eight, each row bolted to two boards so individual desks could not be moved. All the seats were occupied.
    Except for one girl who lived across the street from me, the room seemed one big blur of children. Everything was strange: the American flag hanging indoors, the letters of the alphabet written across the top of the slate blackboard, the picture of a serene little girl in a white dress with a pink sash that hung above the blackboard.
    The teacher was a tall, gray-haired woman who wore a navy blue dress and black oxfords. “Good morning, children,” she said. “My name is Miss Falb. It is spelled F-a-l-b . The l is silent. Say, ‘Good morning, Miss Falb.’”
    â€œGood morning, Miss Fob,” we chorused.
    She then wrote Miss Falb in perfect cursive writing on the blackboard and instructed us to get out our tablets and copy what she had written.
    The whole thing seemed unreasonable to me. If the l was silent, why was it there? I picked up my pencil with the hand closer to the pencil. MissFalb descended on me, removed the pencil from my left hand, and placed it in my other hand. “You must always hold your pencil in your right hand,” she informed me.
    No one had ever told me I had a right or wrong hand. I had always used the hand closer to the task. With her own pencil, Miss Falb wrote Beverly Bunn on my paper in the Wesco system of handwriting with its peculiar e ’s, r ’s, and x ’s that were to become a nuisance all my life.
    The business of right and left hands worried me all day. At home, I asked Mother how to tell one from the other. She happened to be sitting in front of the sewing machine, so she said, “Face the sewing machine.” I did as she directed. “Your right hand is the hand closer to the wall.” Oh. I went through the first grade mentally facing the sewing machine every time I picked up a pencil.
    School always began with a strange song about “the dawnzer lee light.” We sounded out words, c-a-t and d-o-g , and chanted rules: “ e on the end makes a sayin cake” and “ i before e , except after c .”
    Miss Falb passed out thin paper, about two inches square, for exercises in paper folding to teach us to follow directions. “Fold the paper in half,” she directed. “Open it. Fold it in half the other way. Open it again. Fold each corner to thecenter,” and on and on. Mother marveled at my skill when I took my folded paper home.
    Miss Falb supplied each of us with a small yellow box filled with blue cardboard counters the size of nickels. “Place five counters in a row,” she directed. “Take away two. How many are left?” I liked the little counters, but, thanks to Grandpa, I could already add and subtract, and with real numbers, not counters—a skill Miss Falb did not notice.
    Once a week we sang. Miss Falb taught us to stand, clutch our elbows, rock our arms as if we were holding imaginary babies, and after a tweet on her pitch pipe, sing something about “Baby’s boat, the silver moon.” Mother said it was a lovely song, but I preferred rousing hymns like “Bringing