I was just walking back with my passport photos, and there were children playing in the yard. Somehow my thoughts wandered… Grown-ups used to puzzle me all the time when I was a kid.
Say I’m walking home from school in spring. You can float a piece of foam or just a scrap of paper down a stream, and it’s such fun to follow it all the way home, nudging it through the tricky spots and worrying when it goes under an arch of ice. You can collect the bigger, prettier pieces of ice, then melt them under warm water in the bath. And grown-ups walk past, stepping into the stream, breaking its “banks”.
In autumn you can gather colourful maple leaves, and there are big, cool chestnuts too… But grown-ups walk past, stepping on the leaves and the chestnuts alike. Not on purpose, of course. In their world, it’s simply pavement, a place to walk.
