Mud

We live fewer than 15 minutes from the middle school. Small it's called, but small it's not -- a thousand kids or so. And in the morning, the cars and buses and SUVs and vans and pickup trucks converge on the parking lot, idling in line and belching the smoke that has helped to turn the Austin sky brown in the last decade.

But we live fewer than 15 minutes from the school (as the student walks), and so Ben goes in the morning. It would take longer and would be more painful to battle traffic and sit in line and would serve no purpose at all to drive the short distance from here to there. So he walks (loaded down usually with backpack, lunch and trombone).

Between here and there, there's are playgrounds and soccer fields. In the middle of the summer the fields are brown and hard, but in the spring and the fall when the rains do come, they are green and soft. And muddy.

It is fall now, and the rains came the day before yesterday, filling up the rain barrel and making the earth soft. Imagine the shoes of a coming-home kid after walking across the fields of green grass and wet mud. And imagine the consternation of a father upon finding the tracked-in mud on the floors after they have been meticulously swept and mopped by his spouse. Imagine the words from the father to the son and the urgency with which he dispatches the boy to clean up the mud before the meticulously mopping wife comes home.

And now, imagine the scene on the other end, the scene when the boy arrives at school, having walked those 10 or 15 minutes across the soft, muddy fields. Imagine the scene around his chair when the father walks into the classroom to watch the 6th grade put on a show and looks to the boy sitting at his desk dressed as Mark Twain in white with distinguished sprayed-gray hair. Imagine the son looking up and beaming and throwing a quick wave as the father walks in. Imagine the father smiling once and then smiling twice upon seeing the dried mud on the floor in a circle about the boy's desk.

He's the only one with mud.
Is he the only one who walks?

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