Our story tonight is called The Old School, or Garden Tour, Part 1, and it’s a story about the start of a gentle adventure on a brisk, bright day. It’s also about the long quiet hallway of an empty building, seed vaults and blackboards, the layers of history in a special space and a day ahead of beautiful sights.
We give to a different charity each week, and this week, we are giving to For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue. Their goal is to rescue and provide care to orphaned and injured native wildlife.
Save over $100 on Kathryn’s hand-selected wind-down favorites with the Nothing Much Happens Wind-Down Box. A collection of products from our amazing partners:
Subscribe for ad-free, bonus, and extra-long episodes now, as well as ad-free and early episodes of Stories from the Village of Nothing Much! Search for the NMH Premium channel on Apple Podcast or follow the link below:
nothingmuchhappens.com/premium-subscription
Listen to our new show, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, on your favorite
podcast app. nothingmuchhappens.com/stories-from-the-village
Join us tomorrow morning for a meditation at nothingmuchhappens.com/first-this.
Welcome to bedtime Stories for everyone, in which nothing much happens, you feel good, and then you fall asleep. I'm Catherine Nikolay. I write and read all the stories you'll hear, and nothing much happens. Audio Engineering is by Bob Wittersheim. We give to a different charity each week, and this week we are giving too, for Fox's sake, Wildlife Rescue. Their goal is to rescue and provide care to orphaned, an injured native wildlife. Learn more about them in our show notes. Thank you for tuning in tonight sharing what we do with folks you know who might need some help with insomnia or anxiety, or who just enjoy cozy slow living. You can subscribe to our premium channel, which really helps support our work and delivers you bonus and ad free episodes through the link in our show notes. Now this works by giving your mind a place to land so that the busy buzzing, the rehashing, and the forecasting can cease. For that, we need a story rich in details but light on action. And after six years as dream weaver in chief, yeah, I'll say I've cracked the code. So all you need to do is listen and your mind will settle, your breath will slow, sleep will come. This technique uses classic conditioning, so be patient. If you are new to this, best results come with a few weeks of steady use. I'll tell our story twice, and I'll go a little slower the second time through. If you wake later in the night, don't hesitate to turn a story right back on. Our story tonight is called The Old School or Garden Tour, Part one, and it's a story about the start of a gentle adventure on a brisk, bright day. It's also about the long, quiet hallway of an empty building, seed vaults and blackboards, the layers of history in a special space, and a day ahead of beautiful sights. Now, get as comfortable as you can, get the right pillow in the right spot, and let your whole body relax. Soften your jaw, your neck and shoulders, your legs, your feet. You have done enough for the day. Really, whatever it was, it was enough. Take a deep, slow breath in through your nose and sigh from your mouth nice again, fill up, and let it go good. The Old School or Garden Tour Part one. For years I had seen the signs around town stuck in two front yards and flower beds around City Hall or the library signs for the summer garden tour when I'd always meant to go, but when the day came, I might have opted for a trip to the beach instead, or spent the day on my screened in porch, where the ceiling fan and cushy seating tempted me to stretch out for a nap. But this year, it seemed the summer stars were lined up for me to finally attend. We'd had a stretch of cooler days, days that almost felt like autumn, with a brisk breeze and cool temperatures. My new summer wasn't done with us yet. In another week or two we'd be sweating through our t shirts and digging through our freezers for popsicles. So this little break felt really refreshing. It made me want to get out into the day and enjoy the cool air while I could. That's when I remembered the garden tore and wrapped a light sweater around my shoulders and headed out. I wasn't quite sure how it worked if it left at a certain time and followed a particular path from one garden to another, but I did remember that it started at the old school down town, so that's where my feet took me. The old school, just like it sounds, was a school back in the day, not my day. It was even older than that, but my mother had gone there and my grandparents too. It had been modern for its time, two stories of whitewashed brick, and enough class rooms for most of the kids in the village to attend. By the time my mother had become a pupil, and here I liked to imagine her with a stack of books in her small arms, excited and a little shy as she climbed the front steps. It had converted from a first through twelfth grade school down to kindergarten through eighth. The new high school was built on the south side of town, and then smaller elementary and middle schools like the ones I'd attended, grew up in the neighborhoods, and this building sat, not knowing what it was for for a long time. Then the garden club bought it, and from what I'd heard around town, they'd gotten it for almost nothing. The village was happy to have it in carrying hands that wouldn't let it fall into ruin, and since then they'd been slowly renovating it. I stood at the front steps where my mother had and looked up at the old school. The windows on the second floor were pushed open, and I wondered if those rooms still held small desks and old blackboard's. What happens when a place like this is shuddered? Do they just stack the chairs in a corner, un empty the trash cans one last time, and locked the doors. I knew I was meant to be touring gardens to day, but suddenly I hoped i'd get to poke around inside the school. There were more signs stuck into the grass beside the front steps, A small crowd of folks gathered around an information desk, and a woman in a broad sun rise waved wildly to some one trying to park a station wagon across the drive. It seemed the perfect moment to sneak inside, and I casually strolled over to the double door. I pretended to be interested in a stand of brochures beside them, and leaned my hip against one. When I felt it give, I opened a pamphlet stuck my face into it while backing into the building, smooth as silk. Then I nearly toppled over a display table set a few feet in which had a prominent sign on it welcoming all guests to come right in and take a look round. Well, I still felt cool. My sandals made a muffled clap against the tile floor of the wide center hallway, and I stopped to look into a few classrooms. One had been turned into a seed library. It was full of tall shelves with jars of seeds, and the windows were blocked with thick curtains. In the dim light, I read the names on a few of the jars, Emerald gem melons, parts of Gold, Cantelope, red Wonder, and Shaker to meet, black eyed marrow, fat peas, bullnoseed bell peppers, and Harson's Island pole beans. I'd read about the seed Vault on Svalbard, how it protected seeds from plants all over the world, a great depository of genetic information, safeguarding what the earth produces. When I loved that in our little village we had a local version of this. I would come next spring and check out some seeds, grow them in my garden, harvest more seeds and returned them to this library like a book. I strolled through the rest of the rooms, finding that yes, some of them did still house desks and chalkboards, but they were repurposed, now used for displaying some local history or to mark down volunteer schedules for the flower beds around the village square. There was a room with beautiful chalk illustrations covering the boards, showing in detail local medicinal plants. There were shelves with hundreds of donated books on gardening and herbs, an ALMANACX going back before I was born, back to when the class bells still rang in this school. I stopped in the hall on the second floor and looked out the window over the front steps. The sky was still blue, and by the rippling flag on the flagpole, the wind was still blowing. There are a few places I've been in the village where the feeling of history is quite strong, almost thick in the air. The inn, for example, from the lake south of town, on that historical house with the labyrinth and the coypond. When I'm in those places, I sometimes feel like I need to move a bit slower, walk slower, look more fully at the objects and landscapes around me, because there is the layer of now, but also quite tangibly the layer of before, of other times and other people. And standing in the Old School, I felt those layers, and it felt like the pleasant buzz of a house full of extended family on a holiday, or the bustle of the village streets just before the fireworks start. I was so glad that doors downstairs had been unlocked, that the layers were being preserved, just like the seeds downstairs. Just then I saw the woman in the sun viser who had clearly settled the parking situation, and gathered a group of hopeful garden tourists around her. Through the thin window pane, I could hear her bid them all stay together as they set out to see the first garden of the day. She turned on the sidewalk and began to lead them away. I turned on my heel, racing down the stairs on the long hall, as I guessed my own mother had on her last day of school. I caught up with the stragglers, tucking my loose hair behind my ears and smiling as one of them kindly handed me a map of the gardens we would see to day. The Old School or garden Tour Part one. For years I'd seen the signs around town, stuck into front yards and the flower beds around city Hall, or the library signs for the summer garden Tour. I'd always meant to go, but when the day came, I might have opted for a trip to the beach instead, or spent the day on my screened in porch, where the ceiling fan and cushy seating tempted me to stretch out for a nap. But this year, it seemed the summer stars were lined up for me to finally attend. We'd had a stretch of cooler days, days that almost felt like autumn, with a brisk breeze and cool temperatures. My new summer wasn't done with us yet. In another week or two we'd be sweating through our t shirts and digging through our freezers for popsicles. So this little break felt really refreshing. It made me want to get out into the day and enjoy the cool air while I could. That's when I remembered the garden tore and wrapped a light sweater around my shoulders and headed out. I wasn't quite sure how it worked if it left at a certain time and followed a particular path from one garden to another, but I did remember that it started at the old school down town, so that's where my feet took me. The old school, just like it sounds, was a school back in the day, not my day. It was even older than that, but my mother had gone there and my grandparents too. It had been modern for its time, two stories of whitewashed brick, and enough classrooms for most of the kids in the village to attend. By the time my mother had become a pupil, and I liked to imagine her with a stack of books in her small arms, excited and a little shy as she climbed the front steps. It had been converted from a first through twelfth grade school down to kindergarten through eighth The new school was built on the south side of town, and then smaller elementary and middle schools like the ones I'd attended grew up in the neighborhood, and this building sat, not knowing what it was for a long time. Then the garden club bought it, and from what I'd heard around town, they'd gotten it for almost nothing. The village was happy to have it, and carrying hands that wouldn't let it fall into ruin, and since then they'd been slowly renovating it. I stood at the front steps where my mother had and looked up at the old school. The windows on the second floor were pushed open, and I wondered if those rooms still held small desks and old blackboards. What happens when a place like this is shuddered? Do they just stack the chairs in a corner and empty the trash cans one last time and locked the doors. I knew I was meant to be touring gardens today, but suddenly I hoped i'd get to poke around inside the school. There were more signs stuck into the grass beside the front steps, A small crowd of folks gathered around an information desk, and a woman in a broad sun visor waved wildly to someone trying to park a station wagon across the drive. It seemed the perfect moment to sneak inside, and I casually strolled over to the double doors. I pretended to be interested in a stand brochures beside them, and leaned my hip against one. When I felt it give, I opened a pamphlet and stuck my face into it while backing into the building. Smooth as silk. Then I nearly toppled over a display table set a few feet in which had a prominent sign on it welcoming all guests to come right in and take a look around. Oh well, I still felt cool. My sandals made a muffled clap against the tile floor of the wide center hallway, and I stopped to look into a few classrooms. One had been turned into a seed library. It was full of tall shelves with jars of seeds, and the windows were blocked with thick curtains. In the dim light, I read the names on a few of the jars, Emerald gem melons, hearts of gold, Cantalog, red wonder and Shaker tomatoes, black eyed marrow, fat peas, bull noseed bell peppers, and Harson's Island pole beans. I'd read about the Seed Vault on Svalbard, how it protected seeds from plants all over the world, a great depository of genetic information, safeguarding what the earth produces. And I loved that in our little village we had a local version of this. I would come next spring and check out some seeds, grow them in my garden, harvest more seeds, and return them to this library like a book. I strolled through the rest of the rooms, finding that yes, some of them did still house desks and chalkboards, but they were repurposed, now used for displaying some local history or to mark down volunteer schedules for the flower beds around the village square. There was a room with beautiful chalk illustrations covering the boards, showing in detail local medicinal plants. And there were shelves with hundreds of donated books on gardening and herbs and almanacs going back before I was born, back to when the bell still rang in this school. I stopped in the hall on the second floor and looked out the window over the front steps. The sky was still blue, and by the rippling flag on the flagpole, the wind was still blowing. There are a few places I've been in the village where the feeling of history is quite strong, almost thick in the air. The inn, for example, out on the lake south of town, and that historical house with the labyrinth and the coypond. When I'm in those places, I sometimes feel like I need to move a bit slower, walk slower, look more fully at the objects and landscapes around me. Because there is the layer of now, but also quite tangibly the layer of before, of other times, another people. And standing in the old school, I felt those layers, and it felt like the pleasant buzz of a house full of extended family on a holiday, or the bustle of the village streets right before the fireworks start. I was so glad that the doors downstairs had been unlocked, that the layers were being preserved, just like the seeds downstairs. Just then I saw the woman in the sun riser who had clearly settled the parking issues and gathered a group of hopeful garden tourists around her. Through the thin window pane, I could hear her bid them all stay together as they set out to see the first garden of the day. She turned on the sidewalk and began to lead them away. I turned on my heel, racing down the stairs and the long haul, as I guessed my own mother had on the last day of school. I caught up with the stragglers, tucking my loose hair behind my ears and smiling as one of them kindly handed me a map of the gardens we would see to day. Sweet Dreams