end-of-school avalanche.
what to do with dirty backpacks, dried-up markers, and priceless self-portraits.
Yesterday evening, just as I was about to set a large sheet-tray dinner of black bean nachos on the table for dinner, two of my children unzipped their filthy backpacks and released an actual avalanche of photocopied worksheets, colored pages, half-used composition notebooks and empty folders to the floor. There was such a volume of material that I had to push the piles to the side with my feet so that we could pull chairs out from under the table and enjoy a still-hot meal. Eating while surrounded by a school-year’s worth of work on the floor is not my idea of a perfect June dinner, but then it’s hard to swing a weeknight evening picnic spent listening to the dulcet sounds of a bluegrass band, while sipping rosé and watching children frolic from a distance.
Here in New York City, there are still fully ten school days remaining, but already classrooms are getting emptied of school work and sent home to overwhelm delight parents and caregivers. In our family that’s meant there has been, or will soon be, returned bags of “just in case” clothes from daycare, assorted dioramas of the solar system, posters of famous women writers, hand-drawn comic books heavily featuring invented soccer victories, poetry notebooks, small rubber chickens handed out as reading bribes encouragement, assorted unwelcome containers of slime, one climate-crisis focused, Monopoly-inspired board game, and one incredibly sweet booklet of animal drawings, labeled in Arabic and bound in sparkly ribbon. The Lost and Found at school is full to brimming, at least one previously thought-to- be-lost sweatshirt has returned home wrinkled and suspiciously soggy (?) from closet or cubby, and I know there’s still more coming.
The sum of it is, I’m not ashamed to say, something of a personal nightmare. So many things coming in the door all at once, very little of it with a clear final resting spot, much of it quite loved. In case anyone finds themselves similarly coping with the end-of-school-year onslaught, here’s how I try to keep a handle on it. (As always, if you’re a paid subscriber, your personal success stories and solutions are more than welcome in the comments. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, we’d love to have you join the conversation!)