I am not going to be fair in these lines, because after graduation, work and adult life you know that in each of these steps not only mom and dad, but also all their teachers, were driving them.

However I've been thinking about her for days, and since I can't find a better way to congratulate all my friends and others, to thank the commitment of months, years, hours of study, smiles in front of the blackboard even though at home they are a mess, I prefer to rescue that melancholy that my preschool teacher causes me. I hope that the good ones, the loving ones, feel alluded to, otherwise, I will owe many chronicles.

We called her Blanquita, and I only have two material objects left of her. The first is a photo where I hold a diploma in front of the blackboard and she smiles next to me.

The rest I have lost. The cushion we used to sit and watch television. The scissors marked with my initials. The apron for working with clay, even the memory of how to make a paper crane.

Nevertheless, I do keep what is important. How well she drew. That ripping algorithm where the fingers kissed each other. On February 13, when she spoke to us about love and friends.

Because, yes, Blanquita taught us with astonishing tenderness what still scandalizes many today. She was never ashamed to call the genitals by name, and we did not even giggle. She took us to play with everything that the teachers had invented with boxes, lids and shampoo knobs at recess: washing machines, telephones, cars, hairdressers, barber shops, kitchens, cradles. In addition, the girls went to the barbershop, and the boys could be hairdressers. And we drive and they carry weeping dolls.

One day, she put a table in the garden to give us a test run. We would leave, nervous, thinking that we would have to read simple words and trace the leap of the frog. What if. Then she also asked us if we had friends and why we loved them. What we liked to do in the classroom. What was our favorite color?

That final test was the one that graduated us from preschool. A month later, we were all posing for the photo between her and Aunt Margarita. She happy.

In the box where the photo is, I also keep that second object, which is from years later. From when she went to the sixth grade graduation and wanted to write us the blouse like the rest of the kids. "Here, in the heart," she told me. Moreover, until I got home I couldn't read: "Blanquita, your first teacher", in blue ink. As if it took that for me to remember her.