What do I see when I look outside of the bedroom window...

I sat in the car with my father, waiting for the school to end to pick up a student, and I looked up just in time to see a toddler hauling a broken cement stone to a place by the chain link fence. To us adults, it may seem like she's just making herself tired for no reason. But in her mind she's probably imagining building a house. I kept my eyes on her, wondering why this scene is so familiar.

Then I remembered.

In a flash it brought me to my childhood home in Kudat. We lived next door to a community hall that also double as Tadika Kemas. I was probably three or four years old at the time, because I remembered staying home and had to be fed bottles of milk whenever I wanted. The house we lived in had this old school style window that reaches to the floor. I also remembered this detail because when I was spying on the kindergarteners, I was sitting on the floor.

The last kindergarteners to leave Tadika Kemas were usually in groups of four or five people. There's an oil palm tree growing by the fence, just one. It's old enough to grow fruit, but not too tall because all the kindergarteners had to do was stand of their tip toes to pick the fruit out.

I found it fascinating. One of them pick a sharp stone the size of their palm and will gently knock the stone around the oil palm fruit to prise it out of the bunch. They usually pick just one fruit for each of them. The picker would hand the fruit they successfully extract and hand it to their friend. I remembered the picker said, 'Put it in our fridge'. There was no fridge of course. Just a little place on the fence's cement that they suddenly decide will be their "fridge".

In a group of four to five people, when only one of them was picking oil palm fruit, what were the others doing?

They crowd around under a tall guava tree, where another friend was climbing it. The fruit was so far up the tree that the said friend even had to stand on the community hall's garage roof top for a bit. They crowd around under the tree to be the eyes to the climber. I remembered they excitedly screaming at their friend 'to reach a little over on the left'. They pick any guava they could find, albeit unripe.

When they're done, they took turns biting into the guava, not wanting to lose to their friends by admitting that it's too bitter to consume. Or maybe, they already used to the taste, so they don't care. They did not forget to pocket the oil palm fruit. I loved it when I watched them pretending to open a fridge door, each of them took it from the "shelves" and put in in their kindergarten uniform. One of them chose to bite into it instead. 

I remembered thinking, 'Lucky kid'. After watching so many episodes of them playing pretend, I remembered telling someone (perhaps my nanny?) that I want to eat it so much, but the adults at my house said it will give me stomach ache.

Spoilsport...

I loved watching them whenever they played pretend. As a kid, I have no concept of time of course, but somehow my body knew when the Tadika Kemas ended, and I would rush into the bedroom, sat by the window and watch them.

It was one of my favourite memories as a kid.