“Abby, stop running around.”

“Abby, stop fidgeting and come get in this picture.”

“Abby, Abby, Abby!”

We were visiting Goose Island State Park just north of Rockport. There were four young girls with their grandparents in the park, and one of the girls seemed to be in constant motion.

She had to be Abby.

“Abby, come over here and sit still.”

These orders were coming from her grandmother who was yelling loud enough for me to hear her even though I was standing on the other side of the Big Tree, the park’s’ main attraction.

A girl with a blonde ponytail and purple sneakers came racing past us with an iPad in hand, stopping to take pictures of the flowers, the leaves and the sky.

This was definitely Abby because her grandmother was yelling at her to stop running around the tree.

Her grandmother was also trying to get the younger girls to sit on a low-hanging branch so she could take a picture with her phone.

Luck wasn’t on her side.

Neither was Abby.

The three younger girls were bouncing up and down on the branch, and the grandmother was getting more irritated every minute.

“Girls, stop rocking that branch,” their grandmother whined. “I’m trying to take a picture and I want you all to smile so I can get a good picture.”

Whenever the girls managed to sit still long enough for her to take a picture, she wasn’t satisfied.

“That didn’t turn out because you were squirming around,” she told her granddaughters. “Now sit still so I can take another one.”

In the meantime, Abby had climbed up a tree and was swinging on a branch.

“Abby, come here,” the grandmother yelled, and there was an edge in her voice. I think Abby knew that Grandma meant business this time.

Abby climbed down and skipped over to where her sisters were posed. Orders were barked at Abby the whole time her grandmother was trying to arrange the girls for a pleasing shot.

“Stop moving. Stop bouncing that limb. Smile. Not that smile, your real smile.”

Under my breath, I mumbled some choice orders for the grandmother:  “let those kids be kids” and “an impromptu smile is 100 percent better than a forced one.”

After a few minutes, grandmother must’ve been pleased with the images because she told the girls to go play.

Not surprisingly, Abby came racing around us again, a huge smile on her face. On her second lap, she stopped, looked at one of old oak trees and began to climb up on one of the low-hanging branches.

I told my husband I was ready to go, and made my way to the exit past the tree where this rambunctious girl was perched on a limb, looking out over the world.

“Are you Abby,” I asked her.

She smiled and said she was.

“You keep being Abby,” I told her, softly enough so grandmother wouldn’t hear. “Don’t let anybody try to keep you from being you, okay?”

She smiled and said she wouldn’t.

We need to let young girls and boys be kids.

We need to let them run, skip, climb trees, be silly and not make them pose for a pre-conceived notion we have of what makes a good photograph.

Take photos of them hanging upside from a tree limb or lying on the grass looking up at the sky while they find animal shapes in the clouds.

Take pictures of them laughing, with chocolate ice cream on their faces and dirt on their noses as they enjoy those carefree and fleeting moments of being a kid.

And Abby?

You go, girl. Don’t let anybody or anything stop you.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.