I sit in the top row of bleachers watching our town’s third grade football team. Owen’s team isn’t playing today, but he wanted to go to the field. I brought a book (e-book) and read as, rather than watch the game, he plays with his friends that are there.
This is why he wanted to go.
Earlier this week, for the first time since late July, he didn’t have football practice on a Wednesday night. He told me how excited he was, how he intended to use his time.
“I’m going to hit a tree with a stick!” he told me, excitedly and sincere.
I asked him more.
“I just hit it! It’s fun!”
I watched him today in our back yard, sword fighting an immovable oak with branch felled from its own heights.
I remember my own childhood, sword fights of imagined foes and weapons too. Mine were the spring blades of irises out of my grandmother’s garden. My cousin and I would pull near every leaf and swing them as swords until shredded and left as pulp, which we laid on the ground to fertilize and restore plant of our sword’s magic provision.
It made me think.
It made me think how much we try and cram and structure and fit into our kids lives and forget to plan for time to “be a kid:” no structure, no screens, just imagination and time and space to invent our own entertainment and adventures.
I hear my son and his friends playing their own invented game as the structured one on field beside carries on as well.
I write my thoughts. I read my book: imagination and time and space to invent my own entertainment and adventures (in mind); still a kid at heart.