The Sands of March

March is loaded with sand.  It blows into the sidewalk gullies and is then swept across the streets in dusty rivulets.  At our elementary school, sand and salt from the snow plows was scattered across the unforgiving hardtop where we played before school and at recess.  The winds whipped the grains up which often stung our faces and eyes.  Running and skipping across it was treacherous in our thin Ked’s or smooth-bottom leather oxfords.

I was thrilled when an older girl, a third grader, suddenly took an interest in me one day in March on the sandy parking lot behind the school.  As the bell hadn’t rung, we didn’t yet have to line up between the white painted lines for our respective classrooms.  She was an upperclassman in third grade, and I, nothing but a lowly first grader, small and shy.   But that first day there was time to run and jump and giggle together; to let her chase me to edge of the schoolyard where she would ask me silly teasing questions and we would  laugh and giggle some more.

Her name was exotic to my ears – Nicolette and she was even older than my older brother and what’s more, she liked me – quiet mousy me.  Because I was little, she helped me climb over the large slate steps on the side of the school.  But mostly we ran and whooped and I grew tall with her attentions.  We played like this for just a few days at recess and at lunch before we had to line up to go back inside to our warm and hissing classrooms.

I was aflutter that this older girl with the enchanting name had chosen me to lay her fixation upon.  For those few lovely March days, we waited for one another just outside the exit by the auditorium.  And then the games would begin all over again – the out-of-breath chasing, the endless screams and silly riffs.  It was all so exhilarating and she was FUN.  But alas, third-graders are fickle and our heady comradeship ended as abruptly as it began but not without a sudden and hurtful spurning that resulted in painful and tender tears for me.

One afternoon when I arrived back in my classroom and having just learned to write sentences, I quickly wrote Nicolette a note on a scrap of paper.  I crinkled it up and placed it in the pocket of my dress.  Later, just before school let out for the day, I scurried to her classroom to hand her my note.  But I was never able to pass it on because at this moment on this very day and time, she decided to walk by me without an acknowledgement of any kind.  I followed her and then she ran from me as though we had never ever been friends at all.  The next day, she stayed with her classroom friends and I was left to scuttle about the tarred and sandy playground alone.  Confused and with a quivering lip, I watched her from afar but thankfully, just that one afternoon.  Soon I had others to happily run across the slippery sand with.  Nicolette and I never spoke again and the next year, she took her lovely name and moved away.

It’s funny how the first slights of childhood stay with us.  In the grand scheme of things, it was but a mere scratch and so very long ago now.  And yet, the tiny wound is still there if I press it a little.  But I am certainly beyond shedding any bemused tears over it.   However, I do think about those brief and  rapturous days whenever March blows in again and brings along her unsettling wind-whipped and stinging sand…