What we collect in the morning
What my kindergartner knows, I'm still learning.
Most weekday mornings during the school year, especially once the sun starts to rise early again in spring, my son runs into our room and asks: can I make the bus?
The answer is almost always yes, and with time to spare.
So we get ready, stumble through our morning routine, and thirty minutes later wander out to where the bus stops on our road. We usually get there early enough to stand around and enjoy looking up at the towering white pines and oak trees surrounding us. We take what the season offers.
Lately, it’s been the unfolding of spring. From the bus stop, we can look down our road and see just how much green has expanded in the canopy above the street.
For my son, it’s the perfect time to explore. He’ll look intently through the grass, leaves, and asphalt for rocks he believes are dinosaur fossils, or sticks that might have some obscure but real use back home.
And just about every day, he’s thrilled to find something, whatever it is, however mundane it might seem to me. Every morning, it’s the same drill: he hands me what he finds and asks if I can take it home to save, please and thank you.
I do. And as the bus pulls away, and I wave, I do so with pockets full of interestingly colored stones or the broken stems of freshly blown dandelions. Sometimes I take chunks of asphalt home. There’s no telling what could be transported from the bus stop corner of our property back to the house.
And when he comes back later that day, and I’m standing at the bus stop, and he comes home a different kid than he was when he got on, he runs off the bus, occasionally waving goodbye to his bus driver.
And, he never thinks to ask me about the things I saved for him that morning.
It makes sense. He’s had a full day of school, friends, lunch, playing. But I don’t think he doesn’t ask because he forgot about it.
I think he doesn’t ask because observing and collecting in that morning’s moment was the whole point. Being naturally curious about the little slice of world at his feet, early in the day, was it. There was nothing to be saved or collected.
Knowing he never asks for the rocks after school, I usually toss them into the woods near the garage. But one day, I put the rocks and sticks together in a small pile in our front yard to see if he noticed. That week, I added to it—anything he asked me to keep in the morning. For days, he didn’t notice.
One balmy May morning, as all three of the kids walked to the bus stop, I pointed out the pile in the yard. “There’s the stuff you wanted me to keep,” I told him.
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.”
He seemed pleasantly surprised, but kept walking as if he’d never seen those rocks in his life. He could not care any less about the random sticks and broken-off bits of asphalt arranged into a makeshift tribute to our mornings.
It was a good reminder that simply paying attention was the most rewarding part of our mornings, far more than anything we managed to bring home and complicate.
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself,” Thoreau wrote in Walden.
Today, the pile is still there, a small, nearly unnoticeable reminder that these treasure hunts won’t last much longer.
It’s also my reminder to be more like my kindergartener. To pay attention to the world at my feet, and to the way we walk through it, together, while the cheerful invitation still stands.