A version of this originally appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on February 8, 2003

Somewhere, my mother is smiling.

If they read the newspaper in heaven, that is.

In Friday's Pilot, there was a story about a raging strep and flu outbreak that has paralyzed several local schools. Hundreds of children have been staying home with stomach upsets, runny noses and sore throats.

After a week of massive absenteeism and buckets of bleach, the principal of St. Gregory the Great School in Virginia Beach decided to go back to basics.

With nearly a quarter of her 750 students under the weather, Sister Patricia O'Donnell threw up her hands and threw open the windows. She closed the doors, turned off the heat and gave the school a thorough airing.

I'll bet it works.

Long before experts warned about the growth of evil microbes in stuffy, stagnant environments, my mother preached the gospel of fresh air. She firmly believed that germs bred in warm places.

Hence, our house was never warm. And my brother and I were rarely sick.

In a cardboard carton somewhere in my attic are the perfect attendance certificates that my brother and I racked up in grade school. Many times, we trudged up to the stage during the annual June awards ceremony. Not for recognition of our scholarship, but for our staying power.

We were excellent at showing up.

Along with our citations are some really yellowed ones. Those were from my mother's elementary school. Even in the 1920s, when nasty epidemics of whooping cough, measles and consumption were common, my mother made it to school every single day.

My father, on the other hand, never earned a perfect attendance award in his life.

His mother kept the windows closed.

The issue of open windows was never open for discussion at our house. If my father dared breathe a word against the chilly indoor temperatures, he was greeted with an icy retort from my mother who would wave her attendance records at him.

It was the same routine each winter.

We went to bed every night with our windows open an inch or so. Then, first thing each morning, my mother would open the bedroom windows wide, turning each little chamber into a walk-in refrigerator.

``We're killing the germs,'' she'd declare.

My mother warned that if we failed to conduct a vigorous daily airing of the house and bedclothes, we'd be in the same pitiful shape as the pale kids who lived next door and whose mother was always ``running them to the doctor.''

I didn't see it that way. In fact, I looked with envy at the vacant desks of my sick classmates, whose mothers kept their houses toasty enough for coughs, fevers and colds to develop.

While I sat at my hard wooden desk, in relentless perfect health, I envisioned my less-robust friends swaddled in blankets on their living room couches, watching ``Truth or Consequences'' on TV and sipping ginger ale.

It seemed like heaven.

As a mother, I know better.

With both my kids home sick again this week, I had an irresistible urge to do what they did at St. Gregory on Friday and what my mother did all those years ago.

Turn off the heat and open those windows.