The Bus Crayon

 

 

 

 

 

 

There will be a morning you won’t reach for the black rectangle with the white apple on its face. You won’t instruct your finger to slide down the edge of it and find the on button. You will choose not to call up the screen that opens to the debacle that is modern life—the latest horror, a hundred mouths spouting nasty rhetoric and calling it news.

You’ll decide instead to let your gaze wander out the window, taking in the passing neighbor and his loosely-leashed little dog as they plod by on their morning constitutional.

You’ll see the brilliant yellow-orange school bus take the turn towards the main road, plunging you back six decades.

What is Crayola for the color of that bus? Something between autumn aspens and a navel orange. Something like the marigolds in the neighbor’s garden.

Today you’ll get to go to Mrs. Jamesons’s kindergarten. It lives in a red house just down the winding country road. The living room there has been transformed into a classroom, brief morning home to twelve 5-year-olds. There are creamy stacks of vanilla construction paper that sit on a long table along with three tempting boxes of 64 brilliant colors.

There might be a background sound, the black rectangle beeping and chiming. It’ll try to pull you forward into 2025 again with its denigrations and bitter pills and all those people who resemble pit bulls (and I mean no insult to the dogs).

Will yourself back inside the small, plump body. Your wooden chair is hard beneath your bottom as you sit happily sandwiched between the girl with long auburn braids and the boy with thick black-rimmed glasses. The tabletop is cool and smooth as you rub your palms along its surface. Stretch out your fingers—complete with dirt beneath stubby nails, for you love to dig out mosses and unearth worms which you carry lovingly to puddles, thinking them thirsty. Grab that crayon, the indescribable one. It is the color of the busses that swallowed up your older siblings and sped off, leaving you with Mama, who magically transports you down the road to this red house two mornings a week.

You’ll hear yourself sigh as you locate that certain wax wonder nestled in its bus-hued box. It is the color of longing to be older, in 1st grade wearing a new mama-made dress instead of your sister’s hand-me-downs. To carry books like the big kids.

A notification pings somewhere over your right ear. But wait! Don’t go. Reach for the bus crayon. Bring it to your nose,

inhale deeply. Let the intoxicating smell of paraffin call your inner artist out to play.

Stay there awhile. Watch your small fingers dance the different colors into the shape of a school bus with a green frog driver. There are puffy purple clouds in the sky. Next, your own house appears, with fat pink flowers growing as high as the roof.

If you close your eyes tight and slow your breath, the white spaces between the years blur. The boundaries dissolve and all the ages you have been bleed into each other like watercolors on wet paper. Practice this enough and you’ll be an adroit time-traveler.  Let the little lilting lovelinesses fill your depreciated mind with some of that old unfettered wonder.

–Melinda Coppola