Opening a carton of milk recently brought back a memory that had not surfaced in many decades. I remembered milk time in elementary school. Students took turns carrying in the milk for the classroom drink break in a metal crate filled with all these little cartons of white milk. There were no low-fat or chocolate or soy or coconut choices. It was just milk, and we all enjoyed the same “beverage.” I remember even then having trouble getting the top to open right. I like the new cartons that have a spout on them, because it’s easier for me to open. But they’re not as nostalgic.

The memory of those little cartons of milk — and many other grade school memories — is a sweet one. I can still almost taste it. That milk break was special in that Iowa grade school where I spent part of my first three grades in school, before we moved to Oklahoma where I attended small one-room church schools through eighth grade in two different parts of the state. (High school was in Moffat County in the northwestern part of Colorado.) I don’t remember milk breaks in those church schools, but they had their own special memories with students from eight grades in one room.

I don’t remember the names of my teachers in Waukon, Iowa or any of my classmates’ names, but I have a pleasant sensory memory of those first few years in school. Memory tidbits come to mind like those milk breaks or recesses playing tetherball or trading an item I owned to another little girl for a cute miniature doll that was scented with perfume or trying to write legibly and beautifully (still haven’t managed that) in between big lined pages of oversized notebooks or a reading contest where our names were placed on a board and little paper planes were moved forward across the board the more books we read and the closer we got to the “finish line.”

Students are returning to school, some of them to elementary schools where they will enjoy milk breaks and reading contests, others to junior high and high schools where they will reconnect with friends or make new ones and others to church-run schools that may or may not be one-room schools like those I attended in Oklahoma. There will be freshly sharpened pencils, markers and folders to accompany the youngsters as they begin a fresh new year. Many will sport new school clothes, shoes and haircuts.

It’s a new beginning in the middle of the year, full of hope and promise for many, and dread and apprehension for others. The older children get the more they at least pretend to dislike school, but I suspect even teenagers might be glad to see their friends again or their favorite teachers.

I can relate to the awkward children who avoid PE and sports at all costs and not only do not “run” in any high society social circles but barely stumble on the outskirts of them. I only enjoyed tetherball when the big kids were not around to send the ball spinning fast and furiously around the pole so hard the rest of us just had to duck out of the way.

But in some sense of cosmic justice, it seems that most kids begin their school years in kindergarten or first grade on an even playing field with their peers and end them as high school seniors in a similar realm. In between can be all out of whack, but it seems like once everyone reaches that “senior” status, they’re “cool” again.

On these pre-autumn mornings when the air begins to cool and youngsters prepare for another year of education in whatever schoolroom that entails, I have an overwhelming urge to buy pencils and markers, erasers and three-ring binders — and milk in little cartons.