Blast from the Past

The little twinkles and I had lunch with Grammie Imelda (so named for her summer footwear fetish) today. She asked us to stop at my elementary school, pick something up, and drop it off at her office. No problem, except I must write an entry some time on how completely inappropriate the term "stay-at-home-mom" is. I digress.

The school has been expanded. But it's largely unchanged. The lobby is still the same. Same bad fluorescent overhead lights and icky gray linoleum. They still leave the gym doors open, and the kids still jump rope with those beaded ropes that make that ugly smack-smack-smack sound on the floor. Only the scale of everything had changed. It was no longer intimidating and frightening. It no longer held any power.

School, all twelve years until I graduated and found refuge in college, was a slow, repetitive kind of pain. Somehow standing there with my children relegated that experience to the person I used to be.