As of tomorrow, L will officially be done with elementary school, but it was all over and done with today for all intents and purposes: tomorrow is a half-day, and today was graduation.

How in the world did six years go by so quickly? How did she jump from kindergarten — that first Meet the Teacher evening when she was enthralled with the reading pit in the library — to the end of her fifth-grade year when she looks more like a teenager than a kindergartener?

She’s no longer dependent on us for every little thing. She no longer seeks reassurance for every little thing. She no longer plays with toys or watches cartoons, except when she’s watching something the Boy has selected.

She has a sense of things that embarrass her when she once was, like most young children, virtually shameless. (And that sense of embarrassment is sometimes skewed in a distinctly teenage fashion — things that would never embarrass an adult, like taking a change of clothes in a small bag. “They won’t even notice,” I insisted. “They notice everything,” she insisted. I doubt it, but in that case, her perception is all that counted.)

It’s the end of a long chapter in her life, the end of elementary school, the end of childhood in many ways.