This is me, at maybe 3 years old....on the front steps, next to the daylilies that aren't there anymore around the big sugar maple that's gone. The sun was warm and I was wearing my Charlie Brown sweatshirt and matching yellow pants. I still love that yellow.
Its kind of pleasing and comforting to think about the ways that Little Me is still there inside, unchanged, besides my love of yellow and porch sitting. That little girl loved the outdoors best, just like I do, she also loved cooking and all kinds of other helping work. She and I love singing to acoustic guitar, holding babies, long drives in the country and telling people what to do. We love prayer, and church and stories without too many scary parts. We both love corn-on-the-cob, apples with peanut butter, smelling the coffee in the morning and the way bread dough feels in your hands when it starts to get silky from kneading. Little Me loved mornings best, old ladies with soft wrinkly skin on their arms, picking wild fruit and lying on a dog-turned-pillow in a pool of sunshine and I do too.
My boys tease me because I still like to walk teetering across mossy logs on ponds, pick up seashells like I have never seen one before and stop to peep into every wildflower. They say that I am cute, which is kind of a strange thing to hear from your own offspring, but there we are....I'm cute now. And I think part of what they mean is that they can tell sometimes that I am still Little Me inside. I have no desire to become an entitled diva who runs around demanding what she wants or run from responsibility like an perma-toddler....I have actually always kind of loved responsibility, truth be told. But, I do hope that I will always be able to look at that picture and feel that "me" quite alive and well within the cocoon of my mom costume. So much of the time I feel unqualified for parenthood, adulthood, the role of wife, the job of friend, the duty of citizen....but I feel quite able to be a child. And maybe that's a little immature of me, but I hope it represents a kind of reaching for innocence and joy, a kind of trueness through time, a simple, continuous, remembering sort of humility. Sometimes I feel like backwards is somehow the real way, like I need to remember what I was, and revert for the sake of honesty, maybe even safety. I am sure there are some things I have learned and ways I have done well to cast off what that little girl was and become Big Me, but just now, I can't think of any of them. I might be here doing the laundry and looking reponsible, trotting from the house to the car with the car key, but inside....I'm wondering what make cats ears twitch electrically when you just touch the tips of them while listening to the happy hum of the honeybees in my wildflowers as I trot past, impersonating a mom.
