Eshtine

milkweed wishes

In grade school the girl's playground was all cement. The cracks in the slabs suggested lakes and rivers to my eyes, but really it was all hard surface. Chain link fence marched rusted and misshapen along one side, stone pillars and iron bars along another. The view out was an alley; beyond it, backyards of the transient poor, all dirt and chained dogs and beer cans and occasional wandering cats.
I was an uppergrader, a 12-year-old assigned to "watch" the first-, second- and third-graders. (Grades 4-7 got to play in the park on the other side of the school). This duty meant any number of things to any number of girls. You could wander blankly around the perimeter, searching for rulebreakers; you could perform first aid on the inevitable scrapes, you could play with the kids. I tended to go for this last option, avoiding first aid administering when possible and playing the clown when I couldn't, most problems being solved by getting the kid to stop crying. I loved to learn the games the 7-9 year olds were playing, and rarely suggested they play any that required learning rules. The rules of their games were inevitably more sophisticated and elegant than anything I could impose.
Nonetheless, there were times I felt they needed the mentoring of someone wise in the world like me. I knew things I could teach them; I had knowledge to pass on to the coming generation.
One day I brought in milkweed pods that I'd gathered the previous evening from the unkempt fence of the abandoned bus lot down the block. I had stuffed a good dozen of them into the pockets of my jacket and uniform skirt. The tufts of white, cotton-soft, with seeds attached that were crammed inside each pod--these, I explained to my charges, were called milkweed wishes. If you saw one floating along, a starburst of fine silk threads weighed down by its round brown seed, you should catch it, make a wish while breaking the seed from it, and let the star part float away.
The air was heavy with milkweed that afternoon as all the young ones caught wishes and made wishes. Afterward I was scolded by a classmate whose wool sweater had been molested by fluff. But at the end of recess one second-grader, a tiny girl with the longest brown braid and the biggest coconut-shell-brown eyes, was spinning in circles and madly opening as many pods as she could before she absolutely had to get in line to go back inside. She had not quite gotten my explanation that these were milkweed wishes--to her they were blessings; she'd spent recess "blessing" whoever she could find. In the final seconds she flung all she had gathered up into the air at once, forming her own Milky Way, and shouted "I bless the whole world!"