With the recent fire nearby my friends were packing up belonging from their ranch in case the wind direction changed and I began to think about what I would take if I had to leave in a hurry. I’d probably grab my photo albums first….and my journals…..Boo’s blankie. But then the thought crossed my mind: wouldn’t it be nice to have nothing to haul around? There so much clutter, and baggage and things that I think I can’t part with. It makes me feel so heavy sometimes.
Every year….on about the same day (mid year in July)…Mr. LBB and I go to dinner to hold a “STATE OF THE FAMILY” meeting. It’s our chance to discuss how we are living….what could we be doing better….what changes we should make. And we daydream about selling all our possessions and traveling the world, or disconnecting from it all for a while and living out of an airstream, spending a year in a different country etc. And we reduce our lives to the very bare minimum of essentials…..and it makes things seem amazingly simple. We really don’t need much to be happy.
You know what my kid wants? Me. She doesn’t care what my job is or how many friends I have. She doesn’t care what clothes I wear or what part of town we live in. One of Boo’s favorite things that we do is to lay in her bed at night and I tell her random memories from when I was a child. I tell her about dinner time. I tell her about my friends in school. I tell her about my dad letting me roller skate in his photography warehouse. I tell her about the crafts I made out of paper clips and index cards. I tell her about the time my mom caught a baby duck. I tell her about the time I was mean to a girl named Melanie and I still regret it to this day. I tell her about the Challenger exploding. I tell her about when I got 3rd place in the science fair. I tell her how my grandmother took in foster kids. I tell her how I always had the worst school photos but that they are so funny to look at how. And she hangs onto every. single. word.
*****
I’ll never forget when Boo was about 2 years old and we had just moved into our newly renovated house. We had just installed brand new carpet in all of the rooms. I put bleach in the top of the toilet in her room and left her for about 3 minutes to play. In that three minutes, she managed to flush the toilet…..so that all the bleach was transferred from the tank to the bowl. She found a cup and emptied the bowl one cup at a time onto her brand new carpet leaving a huge orange pool. When I discovered what she’d done I went ballistic…I angrily snatched the cup, screamed for about 5 minutes straight about how she’d ruined the carpet. And she just smiled at me the whole time with adoration and love and gibberish….and it made me so mad that her little innocent mind didn’t comprehend what she had done and I grabbed both of her little hands to yank her close…..probably hard enough to crush her little fingers….and only at that moment did I realize that her sleeves were damp and her little fingers were blistering with bleach. And she just continued to smile at me with pure love and I burst into tears and pulled her close as I ran her into the tub to tend to her. I kissed her little face and smelled closely to make sure she hadn’t tried to drink any of the bleach….and I realized how much worse it could have been. And I’ve never thought twice about that carpet since that one moment. It reminds me that the carpet can be replaced, my precious child cannot.
