School is starting. Rise and shine!

Some kids dawdle and complain at the early morning hour. Others arise well before dawn, anxious not to be late.

Schoolbound kids’ photos take place on the family’s front porch: the grouch (frowny face and sticks his tongue out); the clown (exaggerated smile showing all her teeth and crosses her eyes); the princess (“No, you can’t wear your ballet tutu to school — and put down the cat”).

In my day, school-age boys wore jeans, and short-sleeved, plaid, buttoned-down cotton shirts ironed by Mom. For footwear, they wore high-topped black tennis shoes (tenners) or black-laced Oxfords, their hair freshly wet-combed, the hair ridged with comb marks.

The girls wore their hair in braids with ribbons, or curls fastened with barrettes. They wore “good dresses to church,” the “older, faded dresses for play” and their “latest dresses for school.”

My home-sewn school dresses featured flowery cotton fabric with a full, gathered skirt, a generous hem to allow “for growing room,” the dresses ironed by Mom. Two front pockets on the skirt held the “required hanky.” Top off the outfit with brown Oxford tie shoes with white ankle socks.

Yes, our public school girls wore knee-length dresses ALL the time. (Except for bedtime flannel pajamas). This was not pioneer times, but the progressive era of the 1950s.

Then there were marbles. I want to be humble about my marble-playing skills, but I admit I was a champion marble player, gifted from the start. Like a kid belting out Chopin and Beethoven on the piano at age 5.

My marble shooter I ranked as the Stradivarius of marbles. I honed my craft at home practicing on a high-nap wool rug.

For those not knowledgeable in the art and science of tournament-level marble playing, here’s the basics (as perfected at my local school playground).

First, establish if we’re playing marbles for “funsies” (for fun) or “keepsies” (for keeps.) I only played for “keepsies.”

The idea of the game: Use my shooter marble to knock other kids’ marbles out of the circle etched in packed dirt by the heel of a kid wearing leather-soled shoes. Those marbles were my “keepsies.”

I stashed my winnings in my school dress pockets. The pockets developed a serious case of bagging out of shape. Mom sewed me a drawstring, cotton fabric marble-winnings bag, not ironed.

Many participants in sports suffer injuries, medical conditions. Same with marbles. I frequently suffered from “inflammation of the thumb cuticle.”

The marble challenge — how to keep modest in a dress while playing marbles.

Hunker down, pull my skirt over my knees. Attempt to stand. Shoe steps on skirt, waist seam tears.

Or kneel down as boys do. When they are done shooting, they stand and brush dirt off the knees of their jeans.

Problem with me kneeling — scabs on my knees. New, oozing, tender scabs. Old scabs peeling to form new scabs.

My childhood steeped in knee scabs: roller-skating on cement sidewalks, racing across rocky pastures, climbing trees and scraped by rough Douglas-fir bark.

Last day of school before summer vacation. Competitive races held in a nearby field. A personal day of rejoicing —  free of scabs, and anticipating a fist full of blue ribbons.

The teacher blew her whistle. “Go!”

In my dress and dusty Oxford shoes, I roared off — leading the pack. Not sure what happened next. Tripped on a rock? Shoelace untied? In that millisecond of the fall, I’m thinking, “This is gonna hurt!” Crumpled modestly on the ground with a bloody knee, my lament — starting summer vacation with scabs.