This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

A big yellow school bus pulled up next to me when I was driving home from Provo last week. One of the kids stuck his head out the window and shouted at me.

"SCHOOL'S OUT!"

Then he cheered the way you cheer when someone on your team hits a walk-off home run.

I smiled because I remembered feeling that way on the last day of school, too. In fact, those memories were fresh on my mind because my husband and I had just spent the past hour with our nephew's son, Peter Snow, at the old Edgemont Elementary School, which is closing its doors to make room for a new Edgemont Elementary School to be built on the same spot.

Peter, who will be a fifth-grader next year, invited us to join him for a farewell assembly because he knew that my husband and I went to school there, too, back in the day.

(Note: This makes us sound like my husband and I were childhood sweethearts, which we weren't. He was older and I only played kissing tag with boys my own age.)

Anyway, it's an interesting experience to return to a school where you haven't been for years. You walk into the lunchroom and suddenly you remember all kinds of things you haven't thought of in forever, like how we used to have flower shows in September. Kids would cut gladiolas from their mothers' late-summer gardens, stuff them in vases and exhibit them on the cafeteria tables, hoping to win a blue ribbon as if we were Opie on "The Andy Griffith Show."

We had science fairs in that lunchroom, too. I remember one kid who brought a horse brain in a jar, which was awesome and disturbing. The horse had probably belonged to his family, because the neighborhood still retained a rural flavor in those days, which explains why one of my classmates—Smitty— brought his pet chicken to school for show and tell one morning. The chicken got loose during recess, and when we filed back into the classroom, smelling of kid sweat, we discovered that it had left a calling card on almost every desk. Our teacher was furious, and Smitty was close to tears.

Animals were always a show-and-tell favorite at Edgemont. I remembered this kid who brought his one-eared rabbit to school, which was as remarkable for its size — it was pretty much the biggest rabbit known to man — as for the single ear that stuck straight out of its head like a satellite dish.

And the playground! I remembered how we used to line up to play tetherball, smacking that yellow ball on a rope around and around (and around) the pole like in "Napoleon Dynamite." If you were good at tetherball, you pretty much owned the playground at Edgemont. You were king of the hill, the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas. You were all that and a bag of chips, too.

Then it was over. The last day of school. We said goodbye to teachers and asked classmates to sign autograph books where kids wrote stuff like "roses are red, violets are blue, I like ice cream, and so do you." I always had butterflies in my stomach because summer was waiting outside the school door.

Summer. Days filled with water and light, biking and hiking in the foothills by my house, books from the library and comic books my friend and I read on the front porch. Nights filled with night games and Vin Scully's voice crackling over the radio all the way from Los Angeles.

Goodbye Edgemont.

Welcome summer.

Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.