The Beginnings

Last night over a few Happy Hour Miller Lites, my sister Kacie reminded me of something strangely future telling that happened when I was a wee first grader at Newington Forest Elementary School (Home of the Knights). 

It was 1986, better known as: The Year I Learned that I Was Going to Be a Writer.  Well, okay, by writer I mean "this blog on the side of my glamorous career as a commercial property manager".  But whatevs.  You don't become "DFW's Most Valuable Sports Blogger" by being a crappy writer.


Yeah, these guys.

Two significant memory-making-writing-related-things happened while in Mrs. Hammond's first grade class.  The first involved cicadas.  Magicicadas, to be precise.

Say whaa?

In 1986, the Magiciadas, which are cicadas (locusts) that run a 17 year life cycle, emerged in Northern Virginia.  They were everywhere.  It was kind of apocalyptic, walking out to your car and crunching hundreds of these red-eyed beasts under your feet.  Of course, based on the two-week life cycle chart below, I'm guessing were were probably just stepping on cicada shells.  The shells in themselves were disturbing. Little cicada skins, frozen in time. But I digress.



The emergence of the 17 year Magicicadas produced quite the little to do in Fairfax County, VA.  We learned all about them in school, and at the end of their tiny little life cycle, we were tasked to write little articles about what our lives would be like in 17 years when the Magicicadas came back.

Mine was as follows:

In 17 years, I will have a job.

In 17 years, I will be 23.

In 17 years, the cicadas will come.

In 17 years, I will be married.

God Bless Mrs. Hammond.  She must have seen the writing on the wall for me, even at such an early age...."That's very good Beth!  But let's just make one little change!"

In 17 years, I will have a job.

In 17 years, I will be 23.

In 17 years, the cicadas will come.

In 17 years, I will be married - hopefully.

And I'll be damned.  17 years later I had a job, I was 23, and the cicadas came.  And that is all.

It was just a few weeks later and Arbor Day was upon us. Each student at Newington Forest Elementary School - and it turns out, every school in the Fairfax County School District - was given the assignment to design a piece of Arbor Day Art.  It could be a picture or a story, or in my case, a poem.



My little six-year-old-brain popped out the most six-year-old brain poem you could think of:

I Am A Tree

 

I am a tree

My roots are my feet

My branches are my arms

My leaves are my hands.

 

Birds sit on me,

Squirrels live in me,

Blossoms burst on me.

 

But just "Y" can't I walk?
My roots won't come up,

And I can't go anywhere.

AND WHERE IS MY HAIR?!"

Yes, that's right.  I wrote that.  When I was six.

Don't hate.

Turns out it was just so darn cute that I won the Arbor Day contest for not just the 1st grade, but for the entire elementary school...K-6

And I won the prize of all prizes:  A Slurpee. 

Plus the admiration of peers....Well, some of them. They made the announcement one morning, after the Pledge of Allegiance, when my class had already begun our morning journals.  I was thrilled, and immediately scratched out my diary entry, and it ended up looking like this:

Today some kids threw rocks

at our bus.  My poem won the Arber Day

contest!  I am happy I won for the hole

skool.  I am a tree!

During my turn at sharing time, a classmate groaned loudly "I KNEW SHE WOULD TALK ABOUT THAT."  He was clearly irritated by my bragging jealous.

Before you max out on being impressed by my skills, take this in:  I Am A Tree won the Arbor Day contest for all of Fairfax County Schools.   

So here I am in a frilly dress...accepting my awesome award for
being the awesomest writer in Fairfax County.

The public admiration, certificate and tiny tree that I won that day, and every prize since...were nowhere near as cool as that initial Slurpee.