the great trip to a friend's

Leila is a friend's person. Going back to school after our summer holiday last Tuesday, butterflies in our tummies as we were driving through town (mine too, for some reason), we saw her best friend, kissing her mum goodbye as she was about to enter her new school. So far we had only heard rumors that she would indeed try somewhere new and now I thought, Leila was going to collapse. She was reminded of her other friends, and the new ones who may come, and finally clung to the idea that even though she had not seen her for some time, this little girl is almost our neighbor, just on the other side of the "valley". 

So the evening of the first day of school, Leila drew her friend and her holding hands, and a map from our house to her friend's. As it did not quite look like our neighborhood, we drew another one together. She was going to walk there all by herself, right then, even though her friend did not pick up the phone, she would not speak to anyone, she would just drop her drawing there, at her friend's. I asked her to wait, for another day when she would be less tired, when I would have the car to rush to her if someone bothered her, a day when her friend would pick up the phone and expect her visit. I remembered hearing in my youth "quand tu as une idee dans la tête, tu ne l'as pas ailleurs", and it applies to her too, she was not going to let go of this idea. So she went, with her map, and Thembile, one of our dogs, who escaped as she opened the gate. All along the way I followed her adventures from the balcony, called her name and she waved back, both surprised that the echo was so loud that she could hear me so well from the distance. She was quick to go down and up the hills, finally disappeared behind her friend's house and quickly started her trip back with the dog, who was running back and forth as if the topography of the area did not apply to her. Leila stopped to catch her breath at a bus stop. Coline and I went down and met up with her. Her smile was bigger than her face. 

That day she did not see her friend, but the day after she repeated the experiment and spent the evening there. On that first morning of school she sat for an hour on the dentist´s chair, for another tooth canal to be done and did not allow the dentist to anesthesize the tooth. She will have to go back. In spite of the failure, the dentist called her brave, but she did not seem to feel that way. In the evening she did.