Close to Home: Love is ... my first day back at school

On Valentine’s Day every year, I ask my fourth grade students to write down what “love is” to them. I get things like “Love is the way my mom makes me breakfast” or “Love is the way dad helps me with my homework.”

I’ve had a lot of time to think lately about what love is to me. I thought about my husband and my dogs and the way my mom likes to text me articles at 1 a.m. about everything under the sun. And I thought about my dad. I know he would have been proud.

But mostly, when I thought of love, I thought about my classroom at Gravenstein Elementary in Sebastopol. I thought about the paint stains on my carpet floor. How each year, it usually looks like a great deluge of yellows and reds and spilled mahogany. The watercolor cup defenseless against the edge of a desk and a 9-year-old’s elbow.

I thought about hallways and pounding feet. Sneakers in search of basketball courts and four-square. The 100-foot migration from classroom to recess as children find the wind, deaf to the calls of grown-up voices chasing behind them. “Tie your shoes.” we say. “Don’t run.” Childhood abound. Untethered by things adults can’t possibly understand.

I thought of rainy day recess. Blocks and dice having recently collapsed on exhausted desks, now quieted by the reading child. Or, more typically, the frantic echo of “she’s comingggggg!!!” colliding with my ears as I round the corner, unable to manage the smile curling up my lips.

I thought of love letters. Of adoration from fourth graders. “You make me feel special” spelled out on a Wonder Mail from the kid whose mom has emailed 20 times, worried about his place in the classroom family. Or the letter from the eighth grader, about to graduate. “Hi Mrs. B, I’m just writing to say thanks.”

I thought of field trips. And then I stopped. Because that’s been too painful. That loss of campfires and cabins and panning for gold. That absence of costumes and Fort Ross gardens and terribly danced troikas. The chalkboard that still holds my schedule on it from last March at the education center in Point Reyes. The last class to visit. “Daphne, Kamala and Abby were here” still etched in a heart beneath my chalkboard “Pack your Cabin” instructions.

But then I thought of those trips anyway, and their distant return. That exhaustion and love and worry. That feeling of being a mom to my fourth graders and building something that endures the test of time. Singing homesick kids to sleep. “How many shades of green,” my first question as our feet hit the trail. I remember that closing circle where we sit and share something we want to hold on to. All of it encapsulated by the way my fourth graders listen. “I will always remember this place and the way my class makes me feel.” I will always remember.

I thought of a lot of things on Tuesday, my first day back in class. A lot of different roads to love. Marker caps missing. Glue stuck to everything but a project. Late-night emails and newsletters that by May, have more typos than I care to count. Field trip forms and attendance folders and student jobs and silent reading. I thought of time-traveling cupboards and accents and colleagues who build bat caves and bring kids to A’s games and make amazing Martin Luther King Jr. murals. I thought of all of this. All of these things. And I felt it all coming back. It happened the moment the first fourth grader crossed my threshold on Tuesday. One year later. And just like that …

Love is.

Allie Brown is a fourth grade teacher at Gravenstein Elementary School in Sebastopol. She lives in Bloomfield.

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