Love according to a 6th grader...

As my Mom can attest, it's no exaggeration to claim that I'm a dramatic person. If you can imagine it, however, I was even MORE dramatic as a child. Really. I have a very vivid memory of my mom doing my hair (this is in my old house so I had to be 4 or 5) and she asked me to run up and grab an elastic. I returned back down the stairs and it turns out I had retrieved the wrong kind (I had gotten one of those bead kind that is shaped like a lemniscate) so my mom told me to go get another kind I and I just lost it. I broke down and started crying and saying that I was such a horrible person for grabbing the wrong kind. "How could I have been so stupid?" Yeah, like I said... dramatic. So my dad scooped me up in his arms and tried to calm me down by pointing out the ridiculous nature of the scene, and of course adding in some of that humor for which he is so loved. "There are lots of things worth crying about." I remember him saying, "if I had spread cheese all over your arm, for example, THAT would be an appropriate time to cry, but THIS? This is not something you should be crying about." Of course the cheese line got me. And while I tried to still milk out the attention for all it was worth, I found my self giggling uncontrollably which of course was mission accomplished for my dad. 

So fast forward 6 or 7 years to the 6th grade. We had a special assembly where an author came and did a little workshop for JUST the 6th graders. Because face it, 6th graders rule the school. So she gave us an outline for a sample poem we were supposed to write. We would choose a topic, and then relate it to an animal, a tool, and a plant. The example was something about how we could describe our teachers as venus fly traps and bears or something (don't ask me why I remember that, but the venus fly trap image just stuck). Most of my peers wrote about hairspray, or lightsabres, or cars or something, but I, being the dramatic, oh-so-mature pre-teen I was (and still am, in some ways) decided I would write mine about love. I remember thinking I was being SO deep and passing off wisdom beyond my years. As I look back at it now, I can't help but laugh...

Love Is....

Love is a wild lemour, swinging around the veins of your innocent heart.

Love is a tube, allowing mixed emotions to flow freely through your confused heart.

Love is a rose, with golden, shimmering beauty above, but tragic horror- just below the blossom.

Isn't that incredible? I mean really. Between the creative spelling of "lemur" and the somewhat graphic primate imagery, it's tough to find a favorite part. Also, I'd like to know what kind of "tragic horror" I had experienced in my 12 year love life...

Also - since when is a tube a tool? I think I what I was trying to convey was something more like a PVC pipe, but we all know that wording it like THAT would be far less poetic.