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# The school buses
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-school-buses/
- Published: 2026-09-04T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening." — 1 Samuel 3:10*

The school buses are back.

I saw three of them this morning from the kitchen window, yellow and slow on the road past the house, stopping at corners where children were standing with backpacks and new shoes and the look that children have in September, which is somewhere between excited and uncertain. They stood on the curb and the door opened and they climbed up and the bus pulled away and the corner was empty and the morning went on.

Two of my grandchildren are in Charlotte. Olivia started fourth grade this week, or will start it this week, and Jack is in seventh grade now, which is a thought I cannot hold in my hand because he was just a baby and now he is twelve and taller than his mother, which Dan told me on the phone Tuesday with something in his voice that was pride and bewilderment in equal measure. Emma, who is Becca's, is fifteen. She will be sixteen in ten days. I do not know where the years went. I know they went. That is all I know.

The children in this neighborhood are not my children and not my grandchildren but they are children and I have taught children for forty-nine years and there is a part of me that watches every school bus in September with the same feeling, which is the feeling of knowing that something is beginning that matters and that the children do not know yet how much it matters. They will. They will figure it out the way all children figure it out, which is slowly and then all at once and usually too late to say thank you to the teachers who showed them.

My own class starts in a few weeks. The Sunday school room at Trinity is still empty, the chairs still in their circle from last spring, the crayons still in the coffee can on the shelf. I have not gone in to straighten up yet. I will. Not yet. The room is waiting for the children and I am waiting with the room and the waiting is not impatient. It is the good kind of waiting, the kind where you know what is coming and you are glad.

The bus came back the other direction an hour later, empty, and the road was quiet again.

*Lord, bless the ones who climbed on. Bless the ones who watched them go.*