Every now and then I come upon a reminder there were once young children in the house, and not so long ago.
Yesterday, it was brown paper lunch bags. Once stuffed every weekday with pudding cups and juice boxes, these vessels of mother love and peanut butter are now all but forgotten in the spare cupboard with the egg poacher and the rolling pin.
The week before, it was a small blue knit glove, the 99-cent kind I used to buy up by the dozens at the beginning of winter, discovered in an obscure compartment in the Kia. The week before that, it was one red soccer sock that popped up in the wash, a reminder of the 23 years our family spent concurrently and consecutively playing, watching and paying for the sport.
Before that, it was my first baby's sterling silver baby rattle that showed up in the dust bunnies under his bed. And then the Camp Hayo-Went-Ha shirt, which he wore to tatters from the age of 9 to 19, appeared in the bottom of a closet long removed of his clothes.
There are the photos that magically materialize, in a junk drawer, in the bottom of a bin of gift wrap, under the refrigerator I finally swept under. Going through old files in the basement one rainy Saturday, I found stuck to a medical bill a picture of my youngest at 4, with his five best buddies. BFFs into their early teens, they are now rising sophomores at far-flung universities and don't see each other so much anymore.
I don't know where these things come from, how they get where they get and why I'm just seeing them now.
Could be a message from my shadow side, reminding me what a packrat/slobby housekeeper I am. Could be a reminder from God that I need to phone my son, as if I need reminding. Could be a prompting from the Buddha that I need to keep working on that attachment-to-nothing thing, since every time I see one of these items I let out a noise that sounds like a wounded moose or a mother of delightful young-adult children who yet longs for "Goodnight Moon" and fireflies.
Either way, I leave these items where I find them. Leaving them be, not putting them where they belong (which, in many cases, is the trash) means I might find them again. Which means my children are still, almost, right here. As long as the signs of motherhood remain so close to the surface, my children's childhoods are not so far away.
These items are small enough, anyway, not to have an effect on anything other than my psyche. Except for the zip line _ one of those cable things people like my husband attach to trees so their kids can glide across the yard while people like me cover their eyes.
Ours is affixed to a pine tree on one end and to a towering, now-defunct, crumbling, red and gold Harry Potter treehouse on the other. Luckily, it is all in the back of the back yard, out of the way-ish, except that the zip line travels over a redbud tree that gets bigger with each passing year. The last time the kids rode it, I could hear their legs ripping through the leaves of the tree. If they tried to ride it this year, there's a chance they would be impaled.
Anyone doing a critique of our compound, most notably our next-door neighbors, might call the zip line and the Harry Potter treehouse unnecessary and an eyesore, especially if they took a look at the end of the line. Tied around the pine tree where the kids used to take their landing is a blob of old towels, like a giant wasp's nest, they put there to soften the blow.
An eyesore?
Or a permanent monument to our children's childhoods in our own back yard?
You decide, honey.
My husband asked me the other day if I thought we should take it all down.
I literally gasped.
