The Reassurance of Small Children

In late May, I'd finally gotten two doses of the Pfizer vaccine in my arm and started venturing out beyond my driveway. Our local Sunday farmer's market here in Palo Alto was an easy draw. It stretches six blocks down California Avenue, once a main street but for the time being a pedestrian boulevard.

What I love about a farmer's market is the humans. They move from stall to stall using only body language and occasional eye contact to avoid bumping into each other. Like running water moves itself around stones. I love watching the unspoken navigation, patience, and negotiation. I think it's a sign of an inherent commitment to fairness, even democracy.

At a farmer's market I also appreciate the intimate connection to the origin of living things. I'm not a person who makes things with my hands, but I know that it's essential that we as humans not lose our ability to do so. As homo sapiens we feel in our bones that we are capable when we use our bodies in addition to our brains. So, I like being near the folks who know how to bring food to the table.

One recent Sunday at the farmer's market, a small girl catches my eye. She is three, four tops, and amid masked adults laden with purchases who roam in no particular direction all around her, she carries a tiny red watering can. I watch as she walks purposefully to the median strip at the center of this blocked-off road. There, she stands on her tiptoes and carefully tips a bit of water onto a bit of struggling greenery. I do a double take. I watch. I stare.

This little one has spent fully a third or quarter of her life in lockdown and yet here she is taking care of business with a thirsty plant out on the street. She becomes bigger than someone's little girl to me. She becomes a message that with effort and intentionality we'll be alright. In this sense she is oracular, a wise ancestor whom I revere and who is showing me a sign; yet she is also a descendant in our larger homo sapiens family whom I, as an elder, should protect and hold out hope for. As this wee one stands on her tippy toes offering nourishment to a living thing growing in a concrete box I feel that I am observing an act of grace. Then, I grow fearful that I am reading too much meaning into a child with a watering can on a street, fearful that I am looking too hard for symbols, for evidence in the smallest of things that we will be okay. I force myself to move on.

But my dreams fill with adults running marathons while small children stand in tiny boots on both sides of the road, clapping for us, raising their little fists, rooting for us to make it. They need for us to make it: to heal this planet, and its systems, and our ways of being within and upon it and with each other. And of course, we need these wee people, too. They are the most perfect evidence of our ability to survive.

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