Wee Things

Well, that's it. I'm out of the woods. Exams finished, classes as good as done, sun shining, next flight looming. Life resuming. Actually, it took less than the actual exam to shake me out of my state of stress. Heading home to study yesterday, I found myself wading hip-deep through a sea of children who had just been released from the primary school across the street. I was preoccupied with trying to remember just when the temporal correlation of verbs in the infinitive combined with "que" should be applied to the subjunctive versus the indicative -- obviously -- so it took me a couple minutes to get the message, but when it came through at last I started smiling a lot.

Still existing in the worry-free world of prepubescence, these children had no concept of homework or finals or waking up, dazed and dulled, after falling asleep on one's textbook the night before. They weren't in the least bit worried about bruised knees or getting underfoot or smiling the wrong way. They knew kung fu and ballroom dancing, practiced with wild abandon, held hands, shrieked, raced, swarmed, clung to their parents, and whispered secrets to each other with hands cupped around mouths -- just the way it's meant to be done. Halfway up the street I ground to a halt, unable to walk further, though the tide of enthusiam kept flowing around me.

At that age, I was getting up three hours before school started simply because there weren't enough hours in the day for all the imagined worlds I wanted to inhabit. I think I had homework -- I must've at some point -- but I posessed the ability to switch distinctly between work time and play time. School finished at 3:15, I worked until 4:15, y ya está. Terminado. Rest of the day free for hiking to swimming holes or making playdough or playing ocelots. (Don't get me started on ocelots.) Naming potato bugs also took up a large portion of the weekly schedule. And digging mudholes. And building fortresses. It's been way too long since I've built a fortress.

That being said, I also remember sitting under the oak trees at age 10, munching peant butter-filled pretzels and wondering who I'd be when I was big and grown-up like the kids in the high school across the field. I have dreams about sitting next to that grubby, blonde, tomboy girl with her bare feet and big imagination, telling her "In the future, you sail a tall ship. Basically, it's like the termite-riddled playstructure from 1st grade, except it's 35 meters long and the cannons work."

I know she doesn't believe me. Just like she doesn't believe me when I tell her that she'll spend seven months falling in love with huge swaths of the world with nothing more than a bag and a book to her name. I'm a little jealous, because she gets to ride her bicycle home and play frisbee with her father and spend the night covered in glitter, asleep on the matress she's dragged onto the lawn, but on the other hand, I haven't got it so bad myself these days.

It's just good to remember that the simple things are still going strong. If you'd like, spend the next two minutes thinking about really big sunflowers and being read to before falling alseep. Then we can have something in common -- if only for a little while.