The Kindergartener's Menagerie [from the kindergarten diaries]

Ms. Primrose, the possum, had kept us guessing as to her real identity. Noori had thought that she was some mysterious person in her backyard that was digging up the grass in a frenzy, looking for buried treasure. At night time, the movement in the backyard would activate the motion-detector lights. These inexplicable happenings in her own backyard were driving the excitable kindergartener’s imagination wild.

One day, while pottering around in her backyard, Noori thought she had finally figured out who this really was. She came up to me excitedly and pointed to the fence and screamed: “Biloongra!” (Biloongra is a kitten in the Urdu / Punjabi language).

I was amazed to see the creature that resembled quite an unusual Biloongra - certainly could have been a mutant one. Unlike a regular cat or kitten this one happened to have a snout and a long hairless tail. While it scaled the fence it occurred to me that this was not a Biloongra at all. It happened to be a possum. And thus Ms. Primrose came into our lives.

What a delightful experience it ended up being for Noori, and her baba, to capture Ms. Primrose’s images. While we were doing so we started noticing that spring was in the air. It seemed like the frogs that Noori had befriended last year and placed in charge of the backyard had been hard at work. They had been busy clearing away last year’s debris off the soil, tilling the ground and re-planting. “Look baba…the froggies have been working extra hard and now the flowers are blooming!” exclaimed Noori.

Indeed, Noori’s menagerie had come alive with all sorts of plants and animals. Even those presumed inanimate had come alive in my kindergartener’s lively imagination. I happily concurred that this time around, the garden had been readied for regeneration and renewal by the frog folk.

Both of us were able to drop the daily stressors of our ‘work’ (kindergarten for her and the hospital for me, respectively) and just focus on what our garden had to offer.

Thinking about the past two joyful planting seasons threw my mind and heart in somewhat of a nostalgic frenzy. The sensation of moist earth on one’s fingers, the smell of fresh mulch, the sight of blossoming flowers, and the attraction of one’s garden for Ms. Primrose et al, are some of life’s greatest lessons that even a kindergartner can fathom.

I would not miss these lessons in a thousand years…

[from the kindergarten diaries]