Today, I helped with the K/1 field trip to a working farm.

Joel scrambled to the top of a hay bale pyramid.

He and I picked 3 large bags of veggies, including corn, carrots, red potatoes, leeks, cucumbers, cabbages, parsley, peppers, pumpkins.

I am positive carrots pulled from soft dirt by hand taste the best. We’ll find out tomorrow, when I hope to have the strength to wash, scrub, and sort our harvest so we can make chicken-veggie soup together.

Joel got a head start on eating the bounty. He tore into an ear of sweet corn, raw, husked on the hayride. I asked if this meant he’d eat the corn I serve sometimes with dinner.

He will think about it.

Sam spent last evening slapping together the remains of a project he’s known about for weeks. His favorite minute is the last.

The project entailed creating a folding book on a long strip of yellow butcher paper. In the book, he was to paste maps, pictures, and art depicting the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations, plus he was to boil down these majestic cultures into a few paragraphs.

After shushing his post-school empty tummy with a snack of graham crackers and marshmallows (66.666666% s’more) he got to work. He spread his materials on our kitchen table, which sent our other homeworkers hunting for their own place to work.

Sam snipped and glued and colored intricate gods and warriors. When he wrote, he did it strictly by memory because he left his notes at school. I shudder to think he’s mixed them up, but he made sure to include Cortez and Pizarro as important figures. They were the men who set in motion the destruction of these civilizations.

Cortez was looking for Tenochtitlán, the city of gold. Pizarro was looking for vast riches as well, first in Panama, then Peru. It’s amazing what humans will do for rocks.

There he sat, due north of history, a little boy learning about a time when blood Niagara’d off pyramids as a desperate offering of appeasement or bids for the favor of feathery gods. It didn’t work.

Sam finished and carefully folded his paper. He told me that was the same method the Mayans made their books—long and folded back and forth, into itself with a cover wrapped around.

It was tidy and concise.

When violent human events can be scrawled in 4th-grader scritch-scratches, it is at last over. I imagine bones resting in peace at the thought of children seizing the narrative. There are some events so near and so emotionally loaded that we don’t allow children to color pictures with Crayola markers as they stuff two fat marshmallows in their cheeks. The holocaust springs to mind, as well as other events, assassinations, wars, atrocities, and times of sorrow in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Events are still untouchable in that regard. Children are taught about them, but they are never immersed in them. The time will come for that, when distance filters away the salt of all the tears shed to make it drinkable.

You and I will not be alive to see that kitchen table, bathed in early evening light.