Hook: Weather Wonders and School Stress

Six days a week, my wife and I like to get out for a walk around the neighborhood. We skip Sunday – a day of rest and all – but otherwise we try for 3 miles a day. 

We have a standard set of “courses” we use for our walks, but depending on weather we’ll mix things up. Using that old adage that, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing,” we try to get out unless one of two things is present: lightning, or ice. 

This summer, it seems like we’ve had a run of beautiful days and haven’t had to change our courses much because of lightning – and obviously not ice! Although twice in recent weeks I had to go look at a map because a weather alert came through that Houtzdale was the location for a storm moving east with a possible tornado. And, well, until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t tell you where Houtzdale was.

Which, if you think tornadoes are mostly a midwestern and southern plain state issue, think again. Apparently, Illinois is approaching a record for the number of tornadoes in a state in a year. Illinois has had 210 of them in 2026, which trails only the 244 Texas had in 2015, according to NOAA’s national severe weather archive. 

That count is for this calendar year, so in eight months Illinois has seen more tornadoes than a state that is five times larger in land area. It’s not as if flying through Chicago in the winter isn’t trouble enough – now we have problems in the summer as well!

In any case, here in Happy Valley we have had some truly beautiful days this summer. Several with what I would describe as hypnotically blue skies. Not a cloud to be seen, and especially if viewed through polarized sunglasses, the sky has a deep blue tint that seems otherworldly. 

But in the last week there have been some beautiful mornings when we looked up in the sky and all around at nature, yet there could be a question as to whether what we were seeing on the ground was quite as happy and beautiful.

Why? Because school is back in session.

When we go out in the mornings, we end up walking past a number of groups of kids waiting for the buses to take them to school. And depending on the age group of the kids, their parents are waiting there with them – many with coffee mugs. Kind of a Monday through Friday outdoor neighborhood coffee klatch.

And those first few days of school with the younger kids are full of excitement for some, and trepidation for others. You can sense the parents are also feeling this mix of emotions. Sending your kid off to school on their own is a societal expectation, but if anything, that adds to the difficulty of the experience because every kid and every parent is different. The one-size-fits-all, “they’ll be fine,” does little to console those who are feeling conflicted about this forced separation.

That’s one of many reasons why our kids homeschooled. The first for almost the entire 12 years, and the second for his first five years. Because, as much as “socialization” is an often-repeated reason for going to public school, some parents and kids would prefer not to be socialized by a bunch of people they don’t know.

More than 60 years later, I can still recall the trauma of my first day at public school. And I don’t remember a whole lot of the next 12 years beyond that.

A current-day manifestation of that is I’ve been getting Facebook posts for a major upcoming high school reunion next year. There were 683 kids in my graduating class, and I have never attended a single reunion. A circumstance I find is actually a lot more common than I expected as I talk to people from other schools and classes. Because I haven’t talked to a single person from my high school in at least a half-century.  

The thing about public school here in Happy Valley that I find a bit odd is we’re an area so focused on education that a good percentage of the residents have a job with a school of some sort. And that in all those years since my first upsetting encounter with our public education system – which was and is not unique, as others have told me – that we still insist on societally expecting kids to leave their parents and homes at the age of five, for hours a day, 180 days a year. We’re about as “education” as any town can get, and yet most of us still do things the way they’ve always been done. There are other ways.

Which is why, as my wife and I are on our morning walks in late August and early September, we feel the pain. From both the students and the parents. We get it, and we’re grateful for the choices our family made that included homeschooling, charter schools, and public schools.