Slush Season

I always wanted a daily recess. Now that I finally had one, I didn’t want to go outside. Last summer, I moved to Vermont from Miami. Just like every book character, I’m the new kid. I love it. I love having goats and a vegetable garden, just like a proper farm girl. I love living in the woods like Laura and Mary in Little House in the Big Woods. I love watching the snow fall from the window seat in the living room. I love the window seat in the living room. I love sledding. I love sugar on snow. I love everything about Vermont. Except for the slush. 

It’s March now. Mud season, my neighbors call it. Really, it’s more like slush season. The whole entire outdoors is covered in a thick layer of slush that soaks through your snow pants and sloshes over the tops of your boots. Everything is soggy. All The Time. I hate soggy. I hate soggy almost as much as I hate nice shoes. 

Today is worse. I forgot my boots. Now I have to go wade in knee-deep slush in my Nikes. My comfy, closed-toed, inside-school, shoes! There’s nothing that gets soggier more quickly than a pair of Nikes. They even get soggy walking through wet grass in the morning. If I wore them in the slush-lake that passed for the front playground at this time of year, they would probably just turn into piles of soggy. 

The teachers here are serious about their recess. The teachers at my old school would take away the once-a-week recess for something as small as one side-conversation in class. One time, a teacher took away recess ‘cause a kid held his breath for too long. I have no idea what that was about. Here, though, they’ll force you to go out for recess even if you really don’t want to. If you told me last year that I would be grumping at my teacher that I didn’t want to go to recess, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am. 

“Natalie, you have to go outside for recess,” Ms.White was saying. She’s super nice, maybe the best teacher I ever had, but today, I’m not going to listen to her. “It’s school policy that we send every kid out for recess twice a day. It’s important for kids to get time outdoors in their day, and it makes it easier for you to pay attention in class.” See what I mean? The teachers here are crazy about recess. 

“I don’t wanna” I complain “it’s yucky outside” 

“I know it’s yucky, but you have to go outside anyway. Everyone else is outside” 

I really don’t want to go outside. There was only one thing to do. Completely refuse. “I’m not going outside,” I say firmly, sitting down on a blue plastic school chair. 

“Natalie, you have to go outside. It’s not a choice”

“I’m not going!” I repeat. Maybe I yelled it. I’m not sure. Whatever I did. It was that for Ms.White to send me to the principal's office. Oops. The realization that I should not have done that hits me. Now I’m going to get yelled at, and he’s going to call my parents, and I’ll probably have to write an essay on the importance of not talking back to adults. Nuts. 

At my old school, I got sent to the principle’s office almost once a week. Here, I’ve avoided it so far. Now, I’ve gone and broken that streak. Now I’m going to become the bad kid again, and none of my teachers are going to like me anymore. Nuts. 

I walk down the hallway and the stairs to Mr.Bill’s office. I liked Mr.Bill. Now he’s going to hate me. I head into his office. Joy, the office person, knows exactly why I’m here. Ms.White must have called her. Instead of making me go back to his office, she calls Mr.Bill out. He comes out of his office and sits down beside me in the other front-office chair. Too scared to look at his face, I instead concentrate on his tie. They're always different. Today’s has little bicycles. The old ones, called penny-farthings.

“So,” he begins, “why don’t you want to go out for recess?” 

This is not what I expected. Whatever I answer will probably get me into more trouble. I’ll get into even more trouble for not answering the principle, though. I’ll tell the truth. “I forgot my boots, and I don’t wanna get my socks wet”.

“Oh, Ok” replies Mr.Bill. He doesn't actually sound that mad. I keep looking at his tie. “You know we have recess every day, though, right?” I nod nervously. “You're in fifth grade now. You're old enough to remember what you need for school in the morning yourself. It’s your responsibility to bring your boots to school. If you don’t, then it’s up to you to deal with the consequences. If you don’t take responsibility and bring your boots to school, you're going to get wet socks. That’s just how it works.” He pauses. I wonder when we're going to get to the yelling part. What he says next catches me completely off  guard. 

“Do you want to play with some puzzles in my office for the rest of recess?” I am stunned. I nod “Tomorrow, don’t forget to bring your boots to school”. 

He leads me to his office, where there’s a whole table covered in puzzle-toys. I can’t believe it. He didn’t yell at me at all. He didn’t punish me. He didn’t call my parents. He didn’t make me write an essay. He didn’t even make me go outside for the end of recess! And now I get to play with his cool stuff. 

I take in the clear tube full of beads with toy animals inside it to find, the wooden cube that can be twisted so it’s not a cube and then twisted back into a cube again, and the mysterious rubix-cube-y thingy. 

Vermont really  is a magical place.