Clementine

My sister couldn’t understand why I continued teaching at the Montessori. The children, yes, they were endearing, but the spills and sticky hands and tantrums surely weren’t worth their trouble. The word “endearing” bore contempt in her voice.

Clementine was one of my first students. She was only two years and one month old when I met her. She spoke English and French at home, but in my classroom, we only spoke in Spanish. Her hair was chestnut brown and pinned with two pink barrettes—never one, never three, always two. She stared at me with enormous blue eyes, smiling, baring her uneven front teeth, upon hearing me say her name. Clementine snored loudly and had a tendency to leave trails of green peas all over the floor when she ate her lunch, and when she cried, she cried, and it hurt. She was beautiful and I loved her like my own. Those Monday mornings when she ran to me and hugged my calves, singing abrazos y besos, love inflated me. My soul flew, weightless, parachuting dandelion seeds in its wake. Love begets love, from teacher to child, in its perfectly vast expanse. 

The children were beautiful. They were not “the.” They were “my.” I suppose that is why she didn’t get it.

A homage to “The Deer” (103) from Irini Spanidou’s God’s Snake.