By Mitch Lee
It was St. Patrick’s Day of 1975 and the students and faculty of the Inlet Common School marked the occasion with holiday-themed art projects and green cookies at snack time.
With two to three feet of snow in yards and the sap still far from flowing from the Maple trees there was no opportunity to go outdoors and look for four-leaf clovers.
I had spent the entire week working on a personal pet project: a pop-up book that depicted the American Civil War.
The book was filled with little drawings and notes I had made about the battles and soldiers from both sides of that conflict.
It was my goal to use my creative energy to complete this project but it was so much fun I kept adding more pages to it.
Each page blossomed with more cut-outs and pull-outs and springing items than the last.
Inspired by some Hallmark pop-up books, I had hoped to produce something that was much more than a nursery rhyme book.
But all of this was put on the back burner when my teacher asked me to cut out enough shamrocks to fill the windows of our schoolroom.
After cutting at least five green shamrocks from old faded construction paper that seemed to almost dissolve into dust when the scissors touched it, I concluded that the project was not nearly as much fun as working on the completion of my book.
So I put down the shamrock materials and used the scissors to cut out a cannon ball that could be pulled along to fly through a group of soldiers charging the famous high watermark wall at Gettysburg’s Pickets charge.
Then came a voice from behind me.
“Are you working on the shamrocks I asked you to cut for the window?”
It was that sort of teacher question that did not require an answer.
Though I was bored with the assignment and had already cut out three more shamrocks that the other students, her look suggested that the task was not up for negotiation.
I grudgingly took up my scissors again. By the time I was through I had cut enough shamrocks to filter out any light from any window in our schoolroom.
The teacher handed me a roll of tape and I proceeded to place each shamrock on the cold windows, stepping from desk-top to an eight-foot step ladder.
The windows in the upper portion were a bit wet so I had to use my sleeve to dry an area to stick the tape.
Some of the shamrocks turned a dark green when pressed against the damp parts of the window.
Only after I had put all the shamrocks in place could I return to my Civil War pop-up action book.
And in the spirit of the holiday I decided to include a page on the Irish Brigade, and a four-leaf clover.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com