By a random scheduling chance this semester, I start class every day after 12 p.m., get out at 3:15 and walk home around 3:30 - exactly like I did in kindergarten. Growing up, I was in "afternoon kindergarten," meaning that my mom walked me to school after lunch, where I enjoyed three-and-a-half hours of classroom time before walking back home again with my second-grade sister. There seems a nice symmetry in the idea that my last year of organized education looks somewhat similar to my first, in the way my day is structured, and I find that those afternoon walks home on Rugby Road have gotten me thinking back on my childhood more and more.
With my final semester upon me and the end of college - and school in general - fast approaching, I feel myself longing for a return to those earlier days. The closer I get to being an adult, on my own, off somewhere in the working world, the more often I find myself remembering the experiences of being a little girl, safely protected within the realm of "home" and the reign of my parents. Am I the only one feeling the irony of having spent my childhood wanting to just grow up, and now spending my early adulthood desperately wishing I could go back?
Virginia Woolf once described her early years as the "great cathedral-space which was childhood," and the description seems to fit perfectly. That time, as it's stored away in my memory, is one of color and brightness and joy, an expansive place of possibility tinged with cathedral-like qualities of sacredness and peace. There was a sense that life was perfect, that it was easy and existed merely for me to enjoy and delight in.
During Winter Break, a friend of mine showed me the bunk bed he used to sleep in as a kid. The tiny wooden bed was painted like a castle, complete with a slide leading from the top bunk to the floor. "Those were simpler days," he sighed as we looked at it. "Hop out of bed and slide into life." I couldn't help but agree, somewhat dejectedly, that life seemed so much simpler then. As I face the overwhelming tasks this semester of finding a job, finishing my thesis, graduating from college and still trying to figure out just who I am, I feel a continual longing for that easier time.
I long for my mom to make me an open-face peanut butter and banana sandwich ("monkey elephants," we called them) each day before class. I long for swings at recess. I long for the walk home with my sister, pretending we were traveling the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon. (Yes, we really did this. Sometimes one of us would pretend to have "cholera" and have to be helped along by the other.) I know that there are things in my life now that are so much greater than anything I could have imagined as a 6-year-old in elementary school, but I can't help but think sometimes that life today doesn't quite match up to the candy store of exquisite delights it was then.
It is the simplicity and lack of worry that I miss. The idea that all you had to do was go to school and have fun, practice your penmanship, play dress-up - there were no stakes like GPAs and transcripts and r
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