The first thing I noticed about the tiny little hand poking out the tractor window was the face behind it smiling down at my camera and me. 

The second thing was the dirt, traces of it still clinging to the skin, despite what I’m sure were a parent’s best efforts to get their kindergartner ready for the parade. 

This, I could see, was the hand of a little boy who gets to simply be a kid. 

Later, sifting through the several hundred photos I captured during the Jeffersonville Tractor Parade, I’d spot that hand and smile, caught up in the story it told. 

It’s a story of bare feet running through the grass on a warm summer’s night and rubber boots stomping in puddles on a rainy spring day. It’s a story of wading in creeks and catching fireflies, building snowmen and roasting marshmallows. 

It’s a story of being allowed to simply be little. 

If it’s a story that sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because you too got to be little at one point. Maybe you ate some dirt at one point. You most definitely ate some grass – but only a little because you learned quickly that humans and cows have decidedly different taste buds.

Everyone could tell when you’d eaten watermelon because you let it drip down your chin. When you ate a popsicle, the telltale signs remained on your face … and on your hands. 

It’s all in the past now. You learned to hate that feeling of being sticky, to use a napkin, to take tinier bites. 

Can you recall the medium you chose to draw the masterpiece that helped you learn walls are where we hang our art, not where we create it? Was it crayon that could be scrubbed away, or is there marker still lurking beneath a few layers of paint? 

There was a time when you could turn anything into a jungle gym, your tiny arms and legs hoisting yourself up, up, up as you scaled furniture, bookcases, people, and the inside of the refrigerator. You’re taller now. You no longer examine kitchen cabinets searching for footholds. 

Do you remember the sea of toys you’d leave in your wake? The little action figures and trucks strewn across the floor, abandoned in the front yard, left behind in the sandbox? How many Matchbox cars had to rust in the grass, how many Nerf guns run over in the driveway before you learned to stow your things away?

Your hands got dirty. Your clothes got messy. And you learned so much along the way.