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I knew Elena and Valentina would hit it off the second Valentina decided to stand up in the bed of a pickup truck winding down hairpin turns on a ninety-degree slope on the side of a mountain.
“Can I do that?” Elena whispered to me, and I said, sure, because this is what I wanted her to know: the feeling of the wind in her hair in the open air, mountains all around, the world vivid and incredible and herself filled with awe in the middle of it.
The two girls stood with their long black hair whipping around them, watching as we wove past waterfalls and dozing bulls and glimpses of never-ending pine-covered peaks.
When we got to the village, they were off. Before I could orient myself they were clambering across a fallow corn field to the ledge of a tiny classroom, leaping into a void I couldn’t see. After that first leap I waited, heart briefly frozen, to see if Elena would re-emerge.
Then up she came, her hands clawing on the cement ledge for purchase. Jorge and I ate beef soup with the town’s brass band at a local house, the señoras feeding 100+ people from a soup pot the size of a bathtub as part of the village fiesta. I caught glimpses of Elena here and there – dashing behind a building, streaking away from a hidden captor past the Shamel Ash tree at the village center, climbing into an abandoned camper van.
“Is that safe?” I asked Jorge and he shrugged and answered, “Looks like a good childhood to me,” but this from someone who at age 6 used to ride his bike downhill with no helmet and launch himself into a heap of used tires.
All day, Elena and Valentina played. They built a teepee out of sticks that Valentina broke with her teeth, earning Elena’s lifelong admiration. They played hide-and-seek and freeze tag. They swung on the swings and see-sawed on the see saw and spent some absurd length of time digging a hole under the seesaw in order to crush a Pringles can and fill the hole. They wrestled.
The highlight of the day for both of them was finding a discarded, empty sugar sack –the massive kind used for potato-sack races – and crawling inside it, dragging each other around in it, rolling in it through the grass and squealing.
That night, we returned to Jorge’s village to sleep, but we came back to Temextitlán the following day around noon. It was cold that day – around 45 degrees, which for a mountain village with no heating and no real respite from the elements quickly becomes very frigid. There was a slight constant drizzle characteristic of this deep cloud forest. The señoras had wool blankets draped over their shoulders and any kid without a hat was inviting a rich scolding in Chinanteco or Spanish.
But nonetheless, in weather into which most U.S. kids would not venture for more than a few minutes, Valentina, Elena, and a band of village kids played for five hours. Nonstop.
While we wandered the village, taking pictures, going to our friend Eleuterio’s house for tamales and a mezcalito, they were playing.
At times, I caught glimpses of them. Once, I spotted all five girls huddled together on the stone plaza before the church. Then, a few minutes later, several of them were forming a tunnel with their arms and the others were racing through, forward, then backwards. Another time, I caught them dashing between various objects, screeching as they pursued one another.
After an hour or so of not seeing them, a bout of panic overtook me and I stalked through the pueblo, peering around corners. I finally found them all lounging against the wall of a house.
“What have you been doing?” I asked. By way of demonstration, one of the older girls led me over to a hill – “hill” being a generous interpretation, since this landform really fell somewhere between a hill and a cliff. The girl tipped her body over the edge and tumbled like a stone to the bottom, pounding across baseball-sized holes and rocks and outcrops as I gaped. In response, the other four girls launched themselves, slamming into one another and yelping until they came to a natural stop.
“Want to see the crabs?” one of the older girls asked, and when I inquired about where the crabs were, maybe sounding just a touch nervous, she looked at me like I was from another planet.
“Down by the river,” she said, “Don’t worry, it’s not totally in the mountains. There are still houses there.”
“Okay,” I said, as they were all racing off towards the river.
I haven’t seen play like this in a long time: real play, with no adult intervention or direction, no toys, no screens, no snacks, no water bottles, no backpacks or supplies. The kids only had their own ingenuity and the built environment.
They had no houses to retreat to, books or devices to zone out with. The day, with its clouds, rain, sun, whims, mud, trees, landscapes, was their canvas. I’d assume they had to be home by dark. That was it.
It’s easy to romanticize “before times,” “back in the day” simplicity – “when I was a kid we used to…” – and I think it’s healthy to be skeptical of this brand of nostalgia. However, one of the cases in which I think it’s truly merited is play.
American childhood is devoid of real play. This is not a new point, I know. But it’s an urgent one nonetheless.
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