“One day you and your friends played outside for the last time and none of you knew it.”
-a meme

It was the last day of school and all but two of us had been picked up. The sun had thawed the schoolyard into a hotbed of clover and new grass. A few crickets warmed up for their summer songs. It was good to know the playground wouldn’t be silent after we’d gone. Heavy thought for a fifth-grader, but that day, my little class had the rare, bittersweet privilege to know that we’d played outside together for the last time.

Our hands still smelled like the metal and old paint of the monkey bars, and we’d scored a few good grass stains.  Amanda and I waited for our rides and didn’t say much. I sat on the railing, she made circles in the grass with her toe. We kept in each other’s peripheral and watched the world like two dogs on a porch, fully present but without comment.

Her grandmother pulled up and she set off with that universal, automatic bound of a kid headed home from school: blank expression, jacket half off, backpack bouncing. A swell of importance squeezed my chest, but no noise came out. Apparently it got her too, because she turned and said: “I love you!” We’d never said that before. Suddenly it wasn’t awkward for buddies to say. “I love you too!”

That’s when I knew: childhood was over.

With the flick of a switch we were young women, parted for the foreseeable future, but the bond of growing up together would remain. Nothing else needed to be said.

My eyes followed the ridged horizon west, and I was grateful for a moment longer to take it all in. We had been a small class for six years. For a kid, that’s a lifetime. One of us died in the 1st Grade, and her loss knit the rest of us, kids and parents and teachers, into extended family.

Back then, we hadn’t imagined puberty or adulthood with any other set of people, or school in any other building. With a wave of change, primarily with parents’ jobs, we were about to disperse like dandelion seeds.

Toward the end of that schoolyear we shared happy memories of field trips and birthday parties and sleepovers while we romped around, sentimental but still blissfully ignorant kids. There were fewer squabbles, more arm-in-arm walks during recess. Our teacher hugged us more. We actually wrote notes in each other’s yearbooks.

We knew we wouldn’t all reunite in the fall and compare new school supplies and backpacks. We wouldn’t pick our usual seats and inhale the weird, wonderful scent of textbooks that didn’t smell like us yet. We wouldn’t measure our changing shoe sizes or have to adjust to each other’s fresh haircuts. We wouldn’t write little letters on notebook paper, sharpen our pencils out of boredom, line up to go everywhere, talk about the latest Disney blockbuster.

There have been times I felt relief not to know when my interaction with someone was the last. Moments can be snuffed out by anticipatory grief. In this case, I’m deeply grateful we knew it was goodbye. I still feel the warmth of that moment on the sidewalk at the end of the fifth grade. It’s a place to return when I need to recall what I left behind that summer. I also return to remember what I’ll never lose.

Get a load of these mid-90’s monkeys, the wonderfully unsafe playground, and that lovable former warehouse that was our school.