A found robin egg. A leaf plucked from a branch they couldn't reach last year. A proud smile riding a bike on two wheels.
Avid explorers of the mundane, the mud--the incredible when examined through the lens of eight and five. Every day discovers a new skill and invents a new game.
Top of the lung screaming and laughing, running full-tilt in the breeze, bare feet on spring grass, newly cut. The girls orbit around us in impromptu firefly shapes, lighting parts of the yard as they go by.
These are things that bind our childhoods, mine and the girls'. A spring day in Oxford for me was in a marsh, building trails and forts til sundown. Or a bike ride to Doc's Quick Shop or Bringmans or the park. Skipping pieces of oyster shells on the Tred Avon.
It's funny being now the one who cuts the grass and warns for cars, while still remembering clearly my own Huffy, Big Wheel, tree climbing rumpus days.
Raising kids where I grew up, I think about them smelling the same smells, shaded by the same trees, ankle deep in the same water, but all different for how they see it and all new now, because it is.
The girls run over yelling a name I've only had for a few years, hands cupped around a cracked blue robin's egg and I cut the mower off to listen to their story and what it is and what they'll do with it and I know, in that moment, why I am alive.
