Inevitably, it's coming. We've had a stretch of mild, cool days that I really love for summer, a time when we're usually getting beat by humidity. But still, I feel it coming --that morning when the light will be slighty different, slightly off, and you'll feel fall creeping in your bones. Normally, it's a little exciting. When I was a kid, I relished it. By August, summer was getting kind of boring. Over grown and overwrought. We'd played all the games, watched all the movies, pitched endless blanket forts in the living room. By August, we'd be anxious to get on with things--scoping out back to school clothes (or in our case, usually collecting the carefully chosen K-Mart Layaway.) School supplies, which were whole other deliciousness--I took choosing folders very seriously. Kittens? Horses? Unicorns? (and even once, Micheal Jackson.) If we could afford it--a Trapper Keeper that made my little OCD organizing heart pound, and that would probably be wrecked by November. I would get excited over pens as soon as we were allowed to graduate from pencils--as any future writer would. Also, the switch from those newsprint handwriting tablets to white lined spirals was really exciting for me.
To me, elementary school has a smell--and I think it's a mix of Elmer's glue and spoiled baloney sandwiches forgotten for the weekend in plastic lunchboxes. It's not good, but there is something that makes me happy. I was one of those kids who was really excited to go to kindegarten. My mom didn't work outside the house, so each morning she would put my sister, who was barely a year old in the stroller and walk me the five or so blocks to Loves Park Elementary. By 4th Grade, it was a walk, in typical 80's fashion, I would make, first with some neighborhood kids, then entirely alone. There was an exhilaration and excited fear in those walks. I had been amply warned against kidnappers and perverts and instructed to run to someone's door for help if I needed it. But I was fine, and alone, really independent for the first time outside the house. I would cut different paths through the neighborhood, choose different streets, just in case, I was being watched. I had already seen enough horror movies. Even at 8 or 9, I knew how to be careful. It was the 80's after all, and I was far from alone. Many kids, as we were a couple years later after we'd moved out to the country, latchkey kids. My mother, however, was waiting amidst the kids she babysat for extra money, and ready to bring down the hellfire if I was a second later than she thought I should be (as I found out when I dallied a bit too long with some cute boys I encountered along the way.) It's strange to be a child and feel like you have total control over your time and volition. I feel like the world got more dangerous, or SEEMED more dangerous, and kids would never again have the freedom we did at such a young age.
I always felt like that particular school was far different than the stricter one I would head to for grades 5-6. We had a lot of freedom.and it felt like more time out of the classroom and the eyes of our teachers. We would play foursquare or tether ball (which until the late 80's no one cared how dangerous hurling a hard ball around a pole could be.) Dodge ball, of course, also potentially panful if that textured ball hit bare skin. We could bring Barbie's and things from home to play with at recess, though sometimes we spend recess rehearsing talent show versions of Thriller and Donna Summer's She Works Hard for the Money. There was an immense tree in the corner of the schoolyard whose roots stretched out above ground around it--we would hold the tree and circle, trying not to step off the roots, and gab about whatever 4th graders gab about going round and round in circles. In hindsight, it's sort of pagan and witchy behavior for children. There was the expectation that we would behave ourselves, and we did, but I wound up a year later at a stricter school where I once saw the principal lift a bad kid in the hallway by his throat. Where they filed us in at lunchtime like the military, before a brief 15 minute recess. Where we, unleashed, could either wait in line for one of the much-desired swings, try to scale the rusty death trap merry go round, or, as I often did, line up to do forward rolls over the high monkey bars over concrete. We'd flip, land then get in line to do it again. There were small rebellions. We'd get in trouble for trading plastic jelly bracelets and Now & Later amongst each other. I wrestled a mechanical Skeletor pencil from the boy behind me via some bet on whether he could throw it into the hair of the girl who sat in front of me. He could not.
I particularly liked the days our teacher made us clean our desks. (actually this has not changed, I really like organizing everything after carelessness has led to certain amounts of chaos.) Sometimes, you'd find things you forgot you had. An eraser shaped and scented like a strawberry. The yellow colored pencil you'd been missing for months. Your abandoned math notebook bedecked in puppies you thought you'd lost that needed to be replaced. I also liked keeping planners/assignment books only to lose or forget about them for awhile. Dutifully regroup and then forget again. Everyday, we'd shove what we needed to take home into our backpacks. I don't remember the backpacks specifically, but I do remember lunchboxes before I abandoned them for hot lunch in older grades. A metal Disco Fever one. A red and yellow plastic Fame one. Later, one of those ubiquitous orange Tupperware ones my mom got at a party. Hot lunches were served on pale institution trays and sometimes terrible, but sometimes weirdly good. Later, in my twenties when I worked at the elementary school library, I was happy to see the flourescent Creamed Turkey was still intact.
Through high school and college, grad school and working in academic settings my whole life, more stays the same than changes. I still, even now, get excited about school supplies this time of year. Already, I've ordered a stack of crisp green steno notebooks for notes & to-do lists from Amazon in addition to the supplies I'm always buying--paper and cardstock and printer ink. I've been scoping out fall clothes since summer started and waiting for sales. I get excited, particularly after this pandemic year of a really quiet campus, seeing the wide-eyed freshman walking about--so new penny shiny and hopeful. Since the busiest part of my semester is usually the beginning, it's a little more like love/dread, but it's still a kind of love. I did not know as a child I'd be subject to the same sorts of annual timekeeping, semester to semester, but it seems inevitable somehow. Like the farm kid who grows up to be a farmer and thinks only in terms of plantings and harvests. Of sowing and reaping seasons. For me, summer is for sowing ideas and dreaming, while fall is when you buckle down and get serious--about projects, about writing, about work. It's no different as an adult than it was as a child.
It's not here yet, but it's coming...
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