A Happy Rock

For the past five weeks I have been teaching a "gardening class" at Lily's school for eight 4-year-olds--including Lily--every Wednesday afternoon. Each Wednesday evening I am exhausted, but it is the very best kind of exhausted; it feels earned.

Sometimes I wonder if I have steered away from teaching in a formal capacity because it has always been so thoroughly and gloriously my mother's domain. When I force myself to look the situation in the face, however, it is amazing how often and in how many ways I have managed to sneak it into my life. Nowadays, I look forward to my gardening class all week. Even when I am working on something else I am thinking about it in the back of my mind: I walk through the world each day with an eye toward it, how I can impart something essential about growing to these eight little sponges, how I can best be receptive to their questions and ideas.

Teaching this class also gives me an opportunity to practice on a larger scale than I can at home the philosophies of Lily's school and its head and founder, which I believe in passionately and which are so familiar to me from the way I was raised. I was drawn to this school, in fact, because it felt so familiar, and the idea of starting Lily's education in a place like my mother's school seemed almost too good to be true.

So I approach my class with a not unpleasant feeling of responsibility: to the children in the class, most of all, but also to the school, its amazing staff, my mother, myself. There are certain things I do, will always do, half-heartedly but never this; if there was a central theme to my childhood it was that teaching is the ultimate good, requiring, if it is to be done at all, the very best you have.

It's funny: here, in this setting that is mine and Lily's, really, and not my mother's, I am finding my own footing in the classroom. I have taught children this age before. For four years I worked in my college's laboratory nursery school; I led summer programs for children this age; I have worked with older children individually and in small groups for over fifteen years. But this feels different. Something has shifted, and I'm not sure what.

It could be that I am teaching a class for the first time as a parent. I see children now through different eyes, with more--I guess--respect and awe. And these children deserve it, mine included. They are filled with respect and awe themselves, and it is catching. I've caught it bad.

We have been planting something every week, but first it was fall, and now it feels like early winter, and we are in New York, not Georgia. It's cold and only getting colder. So we plant indoor plants, and bulbs outdoors, and cacti, and the children make gorgeous "gardens of the imagination" from paper and pine cones and paint, and we talk about how things grow as we plant every week, but I could tell: They wanted to see. They needed proof. So we planted fast-growing grass seed in a terrarium, and when we came back to school after the weekend, it was filled with green grass, "real grass! really real grass!" and I have never before felt so happy to see a patch of grass as when I saw their faces see the grass, heard them telling other children about the sprinkling of the seeds, and the watering of the soil, and the need for sunlight and air and water, but not too much, not too much.

And today, because the children kept saying the grass was like a park, can it be a park? and I said, Why not? It can be a park if you want it to, they made it "Chelsea Park," and they made people and dogs and birds and a basketball player that looks like a tree, and trees that look like trees and a swingset out of wooden sticks and masking tape and a giant orange sun, and then, as I was about to say it was clean-up time, a little girl brought me a big green roundish shape with a smiley face on it. What is it? another child asked her, and she put it in my hands.

It's a happy rock, she said. Indeed.

She put it in the soil with the rest of the parts of the park, and a magic-markered sign with eight children's names on it, and bumblebees and butterflies and a cat on it, and when I left today, I looked back in, at this amazing perfect park on its little patch of urban grass in glass and thought to myself that this was one day that would end with me feeling not so much as an iota of regret.