by Pamela Mayer
Once there was a little girl who wanted to be big. So she drank up all of her milk and ate up all of her green beans and played outside in the good fresh air every day and by and by she got bigger.
But not big enough.
So she jumped rope and rollerskated and played in a tall tree house and ate apples and oranges and peanuts and walked all the way to the corner by herself, and soon she was a little bit bigger.
Yet she still was not as big as she wanted to be.
So she ran across the grassy meadow and let her kite go high in the sky and watched the stars come out at night.
She painted great wonderful pictures with yellow suns and blue birds and purple skies and she made a paper doll house with scissors and paste.
Was she big enough now?
No, not quite.
So the little girl went to the beach and dug a hole large enough to leap inside and collected seashells in a pail and licked a drippy popsicle that dribbled down her belly.
When it rained she pulled on her rubber boots and went outside and stamped in all of the puddles and when the sun shone again the little girl saw a rainbow in the sky and laughed out loud.
She ate birthday cakes and jellybeans and peppermint sticks and slid down slides and swung on swings and went up and down and round and round as often as she could.
Then she stretched her arms out as wide as they would go, and twirled and twirled and twirled, until finally, one day, she was big enough.
"My, that was fun," the girl said.
Then she skipped on down the lane, over the bridge and all the way home, because now she that was big enough, she would always remember how it was to be little.
Author's Biography
Pamela Mayer has published two books for children, THE SCARIEST MONSTER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, published by G. P. Putnam's and THE GRANDMA CURE, published by Dutton. Her short fiction for childreh has appeared in HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN, MY FRIEND, and HOPSCOTCH FOR GIRLS magazines.