Cynthia Rahn (CR)

CR: I lived very far out in the country so I went to kindergarten with a lot of kids from town that I didn’t know. And I looked poor to everybody else. Certainly everybody else looked rich to me. And so I felt a little intimidated. And one day the assignment was to bring in something that we could create a farm or a barnyard diorama. But when I got home I took off my school clothes and ran outside to play. And then we came in and ate and got ready to go to bed and then I realized I had forgotten to do anything to prepare for this assignment. And here was mama, you know, just got home from work, tired. And I said, ”Oh my gosh. I’ve got to get something that represents a farm.” And we looked. We had nothing. I started to cry and I said, ”I can’t go to school tomorrow and not have anything.” And mama said, ”It’s too late.” I mean this was what, 1962 in rural Appalachia? I mean, there were no Walmarts. You couldn’t just ride out and get something. So she said, ”You should have thought about this when you got home.” The next morning I went downstairs and mama left before we got up. And she would leave breakfast and so I came down to the kitchen and sittin’ on the kitchen table was a barn that was made out of notebook paper. She had taken just plain notebook paper and folded it. She folded the walls. She folded the roof. She folded the doors that opened so horses could go in and out. It was like magic. I looked at it. There was no tape. She had just, sort of like origami or something folded a barn. I had no idea where she learned to do that, how she knew how to do it. And when I came in to school there were other kids that, you know, had bags of store-bought, plastic farm animals. But everybody was so amazed at my barn. And I just felt like queen of the day and I knew that she cared.