The intersection leading from my little road onto one of the main city streets was stacked up this morning as school buses and minivans dropped children off at the neighborhood elementary school. While I waited for my turn, I watched my neighbor Ronda walk the last of her six children to the safe corner with the crossing guard.
Cammi has grown tall — she must be in sixth grade now, one of the big kids, almost ready for junior high — and the once-shy little girl will now chat with me with all the confidence and maturity of her older brothers. There are some benefits to being the youngest. And the older Cammi gets, the more gray I see in her mother’s hair.
It’s almost over for her, I thought.
As I sat there, a captive audience to this back-to-school pageantry, I envied them all. My youngest is also starting his last year of school, but he’s more than a thousand miles away. And the weight and portent of law school can’t compare with the sweet sights, sounds and smells of a public school childhood.
Notes from the teacher pinned to a shirt. Lunch money. School pictures featuring crooked teeth and morning hair. After-school soccer/football/basketball practices. Spelling lists. Birthday treats. PTA meetings, mostly missed. Book reports. Science fair projects. School plays. Christmas programs.
Band concerts, full of squeaks and clams. Sports days. Report cards. Parent-teacher conferences. Smelly gym clothes, washed at the last minute. So many lost jackets that I finally decided to let the Firstborn freeze if that’s what he wanted. Shorts in the middle of winter. The perfect shoes. Swooshes.
The slightly antiseptic smell of a school hallway, or the sweet odor of a bottle of paste. Rounded-tip scissors. Autumn leaves and Indians. Lacy cut-out snowflakes. Michael Jordan valentines. Colored-paper tulips and daffodils made of Dixie cups. Thousands of days entrusting my children to the whims of their classmates and the temperament of their teachers to try to fit them for the world.
Don’t be sorry that it’s over, I reminded myself. Be glad that it happened, and that you were blessed to be a part of it.
I let it all wash over me, and then turned the corner and headed for work, filled with grace.
August 29, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I think I will never be truly empty nested since I have this little straggler to raise, but someday I hope that I too can be glad that it happened. I’m already blessed. This was a beautiful post. Thanks for sharing even if I have to take plane train and automobile to get to your site. I have no idea what the problem is and I’m wondering if anyone else is having problems too. I still have to go to blogcatalog and click on your latest post to get here and I’ve changed the url every which way I can think of and my page just clicks over and over like it’s trying to get there but stuck.