My husband and I recently had the unusual opportunity to drop our kids off at preschool together. The reason this is fun is it’s a hilarious preschool.
The children there are a rag-tag lot, adorably smeared and dusty and disarranged, and they’re half-feral because proceedings take place mostly outdoors, and because the remarkable ethos of the place takes joy in them as they are, not as others would have them. They have names that might as well be Rufus, Rhapsody, Mildred, Bertram, Terpsichore, Pine Needle, and Horace. They wear bathing suits and polyester mumus over their snow pants, as needed; when it gets hot they strip to their underwear. The toys most readily available to them are a large tunnel, a disembodied slide, a ladder, straw bales, tree stumps, a plastic garden cart, sand, sticks, water-based paints which all the children have at some point anointed their entire bodies with, and the glitter someone dumped in the sandbox, which this morning was riding the back of a slug that bore some scrutiny under several plastic magnifying glasses.
Among the more contested tools and toys are the shovels. There are, not incidentally, exactly five shovels, though there are more than five children enrolled. The day we dropped our kids off together, my husband pulled a shovel down from its bucket on the fence and gave it to my daughter, who loves digging. One of the kids let loose the sounds of righteous indignity and it soon became clear in a swirl of feelings and helpful explanations that shovels had recently been off limits.