Juana Briones Goes to School

Last week, I was privileged to join my granddaughter’s Pre-K class. They and their teachers had been discussing how places change — and don't – over time. Catnip to this historical fiction cat.

They were looking at old photos of people in front of old San Francisco homes, scenes from about a century ago. The teachers projected the photos on the wall, and the students would point out things they noticed about the objects and people – what was different from and what was the same as today.

I brought in the drawing of Juana Briones’s adobe house in the Presidio. (See post about El Polin Spring.) The children (all city kids) were so observant – they noticed a log pile (for cooking and heating water), a chicken in the yard, the windows without glass, the walls of mud. They made miniature adobe “bricks” from modeling clay and then all 20+ collaborated in building four walls of a model casita (little house).

Also, I was lucky enough to source some Yerba Buena Satureja douglasii. We talked about how Juana Briones used plants as medicine. Yerba Buena was such an important plant for the colonists and native peoples of San Francisco that the original Californio colonists named their settlement after the plant. The students treated the specimens with care and wonder, using senses of touch, smell, and vision (with magnifying glasses) to understand how such sweet, tender leaves carried such power through the ages, down to us today.