There are two types of people on this planet: those who consider shopping for school supplies to be a necessary evil and those who treat the annual trek to the school supply aisle as an almost sacred ritual.
For me, the back-to-school season has always been about the school supplies.
When I was a kid, I'd be half-crazy with excitement if my parents bought me a new set of coloured pencils as opposed to trying to convince me to reuse the remnants from the previous year (a previously glorious set with the very best colours worn down to the stumps). Ditto for a brand new geometry set in a shiny tin box; a fresh pencil case (one that had yet to be doodled on by a scribble-happy classmate); plus the usual roster of items that made the teachers' must-have lists year after year. I even asked for items we never seemed to need. If the teacher said we had to have it, I had to have it. (Binder page reinforcements, anyone?)
Decades later, I can still remember the smell of freshly snipped pink erasers (the teachers at my school would cut ours in half to double the number of stubs that were in circulation); the way pencils with the darkest lead would smudge all over the page if you erased too vigorously; and how earthy the end of a pencil tasted if you chewed on it during class (an almost wholesome blend of wood and lead). But the thing I loved most were the sheets of binder paper and the school notebooks; fresh, blank and open to the possibility of an entirely new school year.
I never stopped shopping for school supplies after I graduated from university and no longer had any real reason to frequent the school supply aisle. Nor did I stop during the years when I was newly married, pregnant and caring for children who were too young to go to school. Buying school supplies continued to be a late-summer rite of passage, a way of saying goodbye to summer and marking the rearrival of the season of responsibility.
Now that I've been shopping for school supplies for my own school-aged kids for over 15 years, you'd think that the thrill would have started to wane: that a pencil would just be a pencil and that a notebook would just be a notebook.
As if.
If anything, school supplies are even more enticing. Not only is the back-to-school aisle charged with memories of my own school days gone by, they're also alive with memories of my children's school days, too. As I gaze at the blank notebook pages, I remember walking each child to the bus stop for the very first time: hearing the sound of the school bus pulling away and feeling the emptiness in the palm of my hand as I walked back home alone.
So, what is shopping for school supplies like for you? Do you love or hate this back-to-school tradition?
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