First Day! (without a spell check, obviously)

Amelia sat watching the rain slither its way down the cold glass pane. Its pattering was normally soothing, yet this afternoon it droned dully. Beyond the smears the rain made, she could see little of the well kept grounds. The first day of February was bitterly cold and grey. Despite the stout wool of her dark blue dress, Amelia shivers in her seat by the window. She still feels damp and cold from their walk from the brick house to the school chapel and back. The sky had showered freezing sleet down upon them, and there had been no hurrying along the trim path. Not, she thinks with a frown, that hurrying would have been excused in any circumstance. Any breach of decorum, no matter how slight, if detected by the stern housemother, was met with a firm consequence. So, they had all sat, trying not to shiver, miserable through the mornings service. Amelia doubted what good it had done the girls. Worship, she knew, was not something to be engaged in solely for personal gain…and yet, she cannot help but feel, and feel keenly, the lack between the rigid services in the little chapel and the loving exaltation proclaimed in the Psalms. It feels, she thinks sourly, like so many other things in her life, lacking for some element she cannot quite identify. She reflects for a moment, wondering if the day has dictated her bleak mood, or if the weather simply coincidentally reflects it.
I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. Silently, she recites the verse she has been clinging to this past winter. Rationally, she knows there are many things which have worn her down. To begin with, today had been her Mammaw’s birthday. And Amelia cannot help but to remember her Mammaw, and to miss the dear woman who had been like a second mother to her. It was appropriate that even the skies should mourn her lack upon the earth below. Sometimes still in her dreams Amelia is back home in Virginia talking with her Mammaw in the tiny kitchen of their little house. And sometimes, Mammaw was strangely inserted into Amelia’s current life in Lancaster. Amelia would find herself walking along the school grounds, telling Mammaw all her concerns for her students. At first, Amelia had awakened from those dreams somewhat confused. It would take her a moment to remember the truth. Mammaw wasn’t here anymore to be the ear Amelia could confide in or to be the shoulder Amelia could cry on, or to be the companion Amelia could laugh with. And yet, while such sharp remembering always awakened the grief, it never brought her a sense of despair. The dreams comforted her, reminded her that there would be a day when every tear shall be wiped away and she would again someday walk beside her Mammaw in peaceful companionship. Still, it had been a long time since Amelia had had such a dream. They wer not, Amelia was certain, merely dreams, but surely they were brief periods when Amelia was permitted to visit with her dear grandmother. Many times this winter Amelia had asked God to allow her some dream time with her Mammaw, for Amelia needed her so. Each time, she had tempered the prayer by asking for forgiveness if such a request was displeasing to the Lord. Either way, Amelia told no one else of her dreams. And, whether or not the request was improper, Amelia never was able to reckon. What she did know was that all January, the request when unanswered. Perhaps, she hopes, tonight would be different. She so sorely needed the sweet, loving presence of her Mammaw.
And if Amelia was so desperate for love, than how much more so were the girls she lived with?
This question brings Amelia’s attention from her contemplation and her study of the precipitation back to the room of hushed voices. She rubs her fingers together, trying to bring some warmth back into the digits. The concept for the school was a noble one. The girls sent here had all been spared a much harsher fate. Some had been caught in petty crimes, arrested as vagrants when they had no home to return to and some shopkeeper had complained about the waif always huddled on his stoop trying to steal some warmth from the jam of his door and thereby, says he, constantly impeding the path of his customers. Some were arrested for excessive panhandling, when desperation had driving them across the line from polite begging to an unconsciable nuisance that was far more convenient to remove than to aid. A few were caught out in more serious crimes of theft when need and hunger had driven them to stealing food, picking pockets, or lifting items from shops to be handed over to a fence for a night of shelter and a skimply meal. A few others had become wards of the state when both parents had been incarcerated. They were here, rather than in an orphanage or a poor house, as an experiment.
All the girls were placed here with the best of intentions. Surely, the reasoning went, these young ones could be saved from the cycle of poverty and crime that they had the misfortune to be born into. With the right environment, could they not be redeemed from repeating the mistakes of their parents? With the proper guidance, could they not be taught right and wrong? Could they not be retrained as contributing members and workers in society? Could virtuous qualities not yet be instilled in their characters? Were they not yet still paleable? If they were thrown into incarceration with hardened adult criminals, would not depravity take its final hold instead? And then, would they not become adults who would be lost in their wickedness to prey upon and disrupt the progress of morality? Was there not another, a better, solution that could be found by educated men committed to the betterment of society?
There was indeed, many believed, a better solution. And the Lancaster Industrial School for Girls was one of the first of its kind on American soil. Here, girls whose feet were already on a path of destruction could be turned aside from desolation and led down a path of reeducation. Convinced that a lack of wholesome family was a premeditating element in the girls’ demise, the school was intended to replicate a respectable family environment. Rather than one massive building of locked and barred dormitories, the school was comprised of several smaller structures, called cottages, each of which was to simulate a home and family. The girls of each cottage had a tiny room to call their own. A housemother living in each cottage was to oversee the moral conduct of the girls and supervise their domestic duties. One, sometimes two, teachers also lived in each house who were to provide not only the necessary academic instruction believed to discipline and structure the mind, but also to serve as older role models in proper conduct and behavior.
In such an environment, the girls would learn and become all that nature intended a young woman to be. Decorous, gentle, hard-working, domestic, pure. At sixteen, the girls were carefully released on probation into positions carefully chosen for them. Many were placed out domestic servants. Some were released as laborers to milners, tailors, bakeries. Others were given over to mills and factories which maintained boarding houses for some of their female employees. The school appointed supervisors which were to meet regularly with the girls and with their custodians to monitor the girls’ progress and ensure both the good behavior of the girl as well as protect against abuse. Such a system surely would produce women who were competent workers of good character who would either make contributions to overall society through the faithful work of their own hands or who would be a suitable wife and mother for a working man.
Amelia had known all these things about the school before she had ever thought of applying as a teacher. Indeed, the application and interview process was a very strenuous one. Amelia had to demonstrate herself not only as an excellent student who could be a capable teacher, but she had also had to prove her moral character and her own upbringing was one that would benefit the girls. She had humbly requested letters of recommendation from her own instructors. She had carefully worded and reworked her own essays and application letters, careful that she must outline her own virtues, but doing so in a fashion that did not in any way present her as vain, a braggart, or overly ambitious. She had subtly highlighted those details of her family and background that she felt the school would approve of. She had thoughtfully concealed, omitted, or ofsscusalated details that she was certain the school board would hold against her. She had written to her Grandmere and Grandpere in France, pleaded for advice and any aid they might be able to provide. (Especially, she had asked for a letter if at all possible, from a board member of one of the French reform schools, upon which Lancastor had been modeled after.) In short, she had striven to obtain this teaching position. She had put all her talents, all her efforts, all her focus on becoming a teacher at the fabled Lancaster Industrial School for Girls. It became the sole focus of her life, the end of all her ambitions, the pot of gold at the end of her rainbow. Surely, in becoming a Lancaster teacher, Amelia would find a place of fulfillment and a way to make a lasting difference in the world.
And she had succeeded. The competition, not that she as a young woman was supposed to be competing, but the competition had been fierce. Teachers with more experience than she had thrown their hats into the mix. Women with better pedigrees than she had friends and family members who could bend the ears of board members at the latest social function. But in the end, it was Amelia who was chosen for the position. She accepted the congradultaions of her instructors with the proper humility, but inside she had wanted to shout and cheer. She had written a effusive letter of thanks to her grandparents. She had packed her trunks gleefully, and talked a few of her classmates into joining her in a short celebratory excursion to the park and a rare treat of ice cream.