Boy on the swings

Another Vignyette (yes I know i miss-spelled it)

I remember a little boy, who sat on the swings every day.  

He would smile with a grin that lit up the spring air, and his golden hair would dance in the early spring wind like golden straw.  

His backpack rested, only half full with only a yellow folder, with stickers and drawings of stick-figures on skateboards, an assortment of comic books, a few pages of little writing and math assignments (addition) filled the bag, which bent over like an exhausted old man, against the support poles of the swings.    

Around him snow melted from the grass slowly, still here and there in patches, dotting the soccer field like a chess board of green and white.

Every day he would run out from the school while everyone else ran to their mothers and their fathers he would run to the swings, to wait.  I can still remember him dashing across the still slippery asphalt, sliding on ice and jumping in puddles, on his way to claim the best swing, all the way on the left, closest to the field.  

But once there he would quickly stop swinging, and from his bag he would pull a book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  And he would sit, while all his friends slowly stopped playing their own games and left as their parents finally disengaged from their discussions with one another to drag their children home or be dragged home by them, pestering and complaining the whole way.  

Finally alone, in the quiet spring air he waited for his mom I remember, making his way through his first ever "real" book, caught far away in a world where owls delivered the post, and people flew through the air on broomsticks, where wizards hid around every corner.   

Then his mom would arrive, stepping out of the car and he would jump off the swing and put his book into the bag and run to her, smiling and give her what he still called a "running hug!" when he saw her, small arms trying to reach around her and hold her tight.  

"Mommy mommy!" he would say, and she would say "what is it?" and he would tell her, in fleeting, flickering sentences about his day.  First about what had happened in the book, to which she would invariably reply (not having any idea what happened in the book) "oh, thats cool!" or "that's good" and smile, more at his enthusiasm than at what he was saying.  Then he would suddenly talk about recess and the games he had played, telling about how James had tripped and scraped his knee, turning it into a minor disaster, or how he had raced around the baseball field and almost won every time, except that Tim had slid into home plate.  But half way through his mother would pull him away--still talking--to the car where he would clamber into the back seat without pausing to stop telling about his day, still jumping from one story to another.  

And through the whole thing she smiled, and when he finally stopped she turned on the music and sang to it, and he would ask, wonderingly, if she was singing or if it was the radio.  And she would laugh and say "both" leaving him even more confused.

Then he would head inside and eat lunch while he did his home work pages as fast as possible, eager to return to the world where you could make objects fly by pointing a wand at them and yelling "wingardium leviosa!" 

Author's Note

Thoughts?
Questions?
Comments?
Suggestions?
Love it?
Hate it?