I hadn’t meant to wind up at the girls’ elementary school, but that’s where our walk took us. Copper and I had crossed Fox Mill Road, taken a dirt path down to the creek, tiptoed over the spillway (thanks to the low water), trotted down what seems to be an old road along the stream and then trudged up a steep path along a ridge line and (pant, pant — that would be both Copper and me) arrived at the school grounds.

Even though we live less than two miles from the place, it’s tucked away on county parkland and I hadn’t been there in months, maybe years. Only a few days earlier I had gone to my last back-to-school night ever, what was probably my 36th, give or take a few (three children times 12 years), so seeing the old school so soon after that event put me in a valedictory frame of mind.

I kept seeing ghosts of the girls’ former selves, the field days and plant sales in the big field to the east of the school; the playground on that side, too, where we used to come on still summer afternoons (before most of the equipment was deemed unsafe and replaced with boring, innocuous stuff), the mornings when we’d walk to school or I’d drop the girls off at the kiss-and-ride lane.

How big the place once seemed, how imposing. It was a first foray into the real world for them, and such a gentle, loving entry into that world. Almost a decade of dealing with the high school (with its thousands of students and a sign-in process that seems modeled on that of a maximum-security prison) have made me forget what school was like when it was close and comfortable and small-scale.

I miss those years. But I wouldn’t want to live them again.

A much older, smaller (one-room) schoolhouse in our neighborhood.