Went in the afternoon to a nursing home for community service. Our supervisor, besides for freaking us out by telling us all these horror old people stories (oh, why didn’t I just volunteer to go to a childcare centre?), let us out half an hour early. Good thing.

As I was walking back to the train station I had to walk past my old primary school. As the old redbrick building appeared over the top of the hills, I felt a wistful nostalgia come over me and spread over my face with smile. I kept walking and gradually more familiar sights came into view – the tanbark playground, the basketball court, the miniscule oval. The pirate house where in sixth grade we got so bored that we ended up playing spin the bottle with a discarded coke can. Monkey bars, and the permanent portables where we spent many a torturous hour listening to Enya wail over the silent classroom.

Nothing had changed a single bit, and in my mind I could see the ghosts of students past running through the patchy grass. All was filled with the silence of half-learning children, and suddenly I was one of them again. It was Grade Six all over, one of the best years of my life. I could recall all the minor dramas, all the saved memories of our sheltered, self-absorbed world. In retrospect it was so simple back then, so happy and worry-free. Sure it was huge news at the time when Martin dumped Jenny because he’d been trying to get closer to Jenny’s best friend all that time, and when Katie kissed James in the middle of the oval because Susie dared her to, but looking back now? How big we felt, how old and important! School was cruizy, and all our petty imaginary troubles weren’t a patch on teenage angst. God, it was a wonderful time to be alive.

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