The speaker looks back on childhood with a mix of fondness and ache. The early stanzas are full of small, odd acts of defiance: splashing in a garden bathtub as a stand-in for the pool they missed, leaving soup to go cold until flies land on it, sticking out a tongue, leaping from a window. The line "Anyone could be a rebel at that age" gently shrugs at all this, as if rebellion were just part of being young. The word "Anticretico," which nobody understood, suggests a private language, a world that only the children shared. Then the speaker asks, "Remember?", turning to a "you" who was there too.
The mood shifts when the poem moves to growing up. The courtyard time shrinks, and the speaker mentions a "rage to scale down everything." The ending is quiet and strange: clothes washed and left outside "all night long, all day long / and one more night." That drifting, lingering image feels like waiting, or like a childhood left out too long to dry.