Kage school becomes real again, with new purpose

In Margery Williams' classic children's novel, "The Velveteen Rabbit," a stuffed animal longs to become a real bunny.

One day, he asks another toy what it would take to do just that.

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," the rabbit asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

The same can be said for the Kage School in Cape Girardeau.

Once a blighted shadow of its former self, the school has been reborn as a charming, two-bedroom guest cottage with a long history of wear and tear, youth and discovery, and time moving on.

Though the school closed in 1966, former students still hold fond memories of the place where they learned alongside children in other grades.

"When I was here, it was a two-room school; the partitions were down and on one side was the first, second, third and fourth grades, and when I was a first-grader, I learned to spell 'accommodate' and I thought I was really, really smart," Barbara Deimund Swink reminisced in a recent story about the school's renovation.

She attended Kage from 1936 to 1938, and her brother, Keith Deimund, who owned the building for about a decade, recently sold it to Rick Hetzel, who set about dreaming up an adaptive reuse that would save Kage but at the same time give it new purpose.

You might say the school has become Real again, though it never really stopped being Real to those who loved it so well.