Sunny's classroom would greet her with a distinctive and pleasant minty fragrance when she entered every morning; it complimented the cool autumn winds that followed her into the school, and she became used to breathing in its clean tanginess. Other than the sunflower seeds that always littered the floor and a few scraps of paper that sometimes joined in with the dust that crept in through the cracks in the windows, she didn’t have to spend much time cleaning up with her broom and dust towel every night.

The students’ desks were the old-fashioned kind like those Sunny’d had when she was a kid; the kind that you could raise the surface up and put in your books and pencils and things you wanted to store until the end of the class. The tops were a pale, piney wood that sloped toward you, inviting that book or piece of blank lined paper to lounge in an appealing attitude. The backs of the chairs and the seats matched the wooden surfaces; the rest was a rusty orange metal. She noticed that kids tended to sit at the same desks every day and that girls were more territorial than boys. One day, Rosa let Buster know, in quiet but firm language, that she wanted him to get away from her desk and sit where he was supposed to sit. Buster, the bespectacled court jester, loved nothing better than to tease, and that morning he was in rare form.

“Well, where’s your name?” he asked with an I’m-just-curious crane of his neck to the desk’s surface.

“What? What name?” Rosa returned.

“Well, the one on that desk that says it’s yours,” Buster chittered. There was an appreciative chuckle from the room.

“You know very well there is no name there, Buster. But if you open up that desk, I promise we’ll all know that it don’t belong to me.”

The kids all froze in their seats at that moment, their eyes glued to the two adversaries. Sunny had been writing something on the board, but the silence in the room at that moment was palpable, and she turned to observe the tableau before her. No one looked her way. Finally, someone coughed, Buster went to his usual seat, and Rosa sat at her desk, her face a stormy cloud.

After a moment of intense quiet, Rosa, face clearing with a bright smile, chided her friend: “Aw, Buster, I know you just thought you’d get smarter if you sat in my desk. Shsssssss.” The students smiled at her lame joke as Buster bowed his head and grinned. 

Sunny decided not to pursue the matter at that time but resolved to check out the desks after school that day. She opened Rosa’s desktop first. Nothing there. Hmmm. Who else sat there during the other classes? Maggie and Michelle. Then she opened Buster’s desk. And closed it really quickly. Ugh! Spent sunflower seed shells dotted a horrid, slug-colored goo of minty smelling hills that covered the base of the desk’s book box. What a disgusting mess! She fought her gag reflex. What was that stuff? Where did it come from? 

She marched around the room, checking all the other desks. It became clear that only boys sat at some desks; most girls seemed to consistently choose desks used only by other girls. And it was mostly the boys’ desks that had those disgusting inner sanctums.

Gig strolled in at that moment, looking for a yearbook calendar. The indignation Sunny felt was obviously planted on her face. “What’s wrong, Ms. L?” he asked.

“Gig, look in that desk and tell me what you see,” she requested, trying hard to control her disgust.

“Sure.” he responded with his usual sunny-side-up attitude. “Oh, yeah. Snoose,” he reported.

“Snoose? What’s snoose?”

“You don’t know about snoose?”

“No.”

"Really?  You really don't know what it is?"

"No.  I really don't."

“Haven’t you noticed that the guys in your classes always have their lower lips kind of sticking out? That’s snoose.”

“Gig, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Though, yes, come to think about it, I have noticed that lower cheeks do sometimes seem to kind of blossom out on some of the boys. But what is it? What’s snoose?”

“It’s tobacco. It comes in a can. They put it in front of their teeth down by their gums. And then they have to spit. So they spit in the desks.”

“Well, YUK!” Sunny exclaimed. “What a mess! They are all going to clean it up tomorrow. I’m going to get paper towels and bags, they are going to get that horrible stuff out of my desks!”

Gig smiled. “Everybody, huh? Even the girls?”

That stopped her. No, that wouldn’t be fair, would it? “You’re right. I’m going to have to think about this, Gig. What do the other teachers do?”

“The ones who have desks like this just leave the stuff in there all year, and I think somebody cleans it up during the summer. But your classroom is about the only one with these kinds of desks in it.”

“What about the sunflower seeds? They’re all over the floor every night, and the girls help with that mess, too.”

“Oh, every once in awhile teachers make a big fuss and send them to the office, but it don’t change. Kids just keep chewing snoose and sunflower seeds.  I gotta go.  Good luck!  Okay?”

“Yep. Later.” 

Sunny didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas around with as she had done with my team teacher friends back home. She had learned from her last bump in the road here that what worked tended to call for a sense of the humor in things, but she couldn’t find one laugh in her when she thought about having to clean up that goo. And her fellow teachers had figured out that she wasn’t truly one of them, so they were polite with one another but not really friends she felt comfortable about discussing her problem with. She did try talking to one of the teachers that afternoon, but that one just shrugged and reminded Sunny that they weren’t in the big city now – that these kids hadn’t been properly raised by their parents and were, indeed, really messy, even filthy. Sunny remarked that the kids back home had been much, much less concerned about littering her classroom and, after bragging a little bit that there were custodians to clean up the mess there, let it go at that. So she had to figure this one out on my own. She felt lonely.

On her way out of the building that afternoon, she stopped in the office to say hi to Carol, the secretary. She had that grin of hers ready for Sunny and listened quietly as she told her goo story.

“Seems like you have to figure out whether to punish or praise,” she quipped. “You’ll find an answer. I know you will. And I bet it’ll be a doozy!” 

They giggled together, and Sunny left for home.

That night as she was cleaning up after a quick dinner of tuna sandwiches and potato chips, Sunny was getting ready to throw out the tuna cans when the little bulb lit up in her head like a ray of sunshine on the big yellow face of its namesake plant. She’d talk to the kids about the mess and explain her aversion to the idea of cleaning up people’s spit. Then they’d collect some short cans, no taller than, say, six inches, decorate them, and put them in the desks. Even those commodity soup cans would work. Maybe they could even figure out a way to put tops on them so that an unsuspecting someone wouldn’t have to gag through an unwanted peek at the contents. They’d have to get lots of cans so that they could be changed every now and then. Snoose Seed cans! That was the answer!

The plan worked in numerous ways. The kids liked the fact that Sunny didn’t lecture them but, instead, asked them to help solve the seedy goo problem. Give the teacher a point. They enjoyed collecting the cans from the people of the village. It gave Sunny an opportunity to meet the families in both communities and an excuse to enter their homes. Now, when their cars passed her VW driving up or down the main road, folks knew who was responding to their friendly waves with fingers flashing the peace sign. People liked having one up on the city girl who didn’t know about snoose, and that made Sunny perhaps a bit more accessible and, as a representative of the school, a little less intimidating. Kids liked decorating the tin cans; it was fun to try to figure out who made the one that was in your desk. And, after they'd taken the desks outside and swooshed them down with a hose, most of the desk caves containing the Snoose Seed cans ceased sprouting the little mountains of seeds and goo.

Some may say that Sunny enabled kids to use a dangerous drug. They wouldn’t be far wrong. In a survey in 1986 at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, 1,776 kids, grades K-12, at eight schools on the reservation completed an anonymous, self-administered questionnaire (89% were Native Americans and 11% were non-Indians). But her solution was the right one for that time and place and, at that time, no one knew the consequences of using the products of big-time tobacco companies. Sunny would remember the event for a long time and think with pride about how she’d solved the problem – her way. Carol had once advised, "Gotta pick your wars carefully here."  Yep. So true.

The first weeks of the job had been full of hard work, followed by long hours of homework and intense loneliness at home.  None of the windows in Sunny's little duplex faced toward the compound, where the shabby white trailers of her Texan neighbors sprinkled the grass, the red brick school house crouching in the background.  The other teachers weren't exactly unfriendly; it was simply clear that Sunny was not one of them.  Her polite refusals to attend comedy hour gatherings were followed by several curt requests that Sunny turn down her disagreeable music; no further invitations to group barbeques around a picnic table in front of Gray's trailer were issued. 

Sunny had yearbook meetings after school most days, and so she wasn't able to join the teachers who gathered in the room next door to chat until it was time to leave the building.  Instead, she and her peers enjoyed a cool, professional relationship inside and outside school.  After school, on hot September afternoons, Sunny studied dry scrub and the high chain link fence surrounding the compound that snaked along the dusty road.  Fat, sassy grasshoppers flung themselves from one destination to another, slapping against the picture window of Sunny's duplex. 

Her big event each day, other than Sunday, was a journey to the Trading Post, about a half mile up the road from her place.  Instead of a formal address, Sunny had her very first post office box number, 1926, and delighted in the daily officious act of opening its metal door.  Allen and Lucy Murphy owned the store.  He was a tall, stooped-over white guy with a quiet, bespectacled face that balanced on a long neck with a pronounced Adams apple.  His wife, Lucy, was an Inuit from up in Alaska somewhere.

Alice, the mother of one of Sunny's ninth grade English classes' most mischievious students, was the Post Mistress.  She reminded Sunny of a herself a bit, with her short, fluffy brownish red hair and full figure.  Her light-skinned, round face wore seriously dark red lipstick with no other ornamentation.  Alice had a calm, friendly manner, and Sunny looked forward to their brief interchanges.

Everyone from the village seemed to appear at the Trading Post at about the same time every day to collect mail, buy cigarettes and other grocery items, or just stand around an quietly chat.  Sunny hadn't met many of the people who lived on the reservation yet, other than her students, and it was bothering her that she hadn't yet made friends with anyone.  She decided to dawdle around every day, hoping to get invited into a conversation.  Every once in awhile, she'd make some short, inane comment to someone she didn't know, and all of the people in the room would stop, faces raised to the air like the beaked faces of pheasants suddenly suspicious of a strange sound in the area.  Sunny's responder usually tossed back an unassuming, cryptic remark, followed by continued silence, and then the relieved retreat of the occupants of the room back to their soft conversations, punctuated with what were, to Sunny, somewhat long silences.  She became obsessed with thedesire to have someone talk with her and spent more and moretime just hanging around the store, staring at the floor, the various and sundry items for sale, her mail, her feet, the busy Post Mistress, the floor.  She felt like a loud, kind of raucus, too shiny, northwestern Raven who'd accidentally landed in a convocation of smooth, confident eagles.