grown children

This morning Chuck and Ray and Elliot and I went out for breakfast. Elliot sat on my lap instead of in a booster seat. We went to Ernie's which is a small diner/cafe on East Walnut in Columbia. Elliot and I missed the story time at the library, we will hit it next week because I will be back in town before making the long drive to San Antonio, to work.

The thing about children is that they grow up and as I was sorting through the detritus which I have carried with me from place to place to place to place, I asked Chuck what we should do with it all. "Give it away or to the Good Will", he said.  He was right, of course.

The beauty of growing older, for me anyway, is this shedding of skin, this releasing of "things" which have been carried around for years. Then, there are the children's things which they long ago forgot. Mementos from childhood, pictures, and art projects stored in Sterlite boxes, as if the past could be resurrected by opening a Sterlite box. These I will keep.

It is difficult to let go sometimes, to move on. The piece of furniture that was in my parents house that I had a boyfriend, at the time, drive up and help me load into the back of his pick-up to haul back to Columbia...it is a piece I thought I would one day re-do. It too will be let go of, discarded and eventually, forgotten.

There are very few things to keep. The iron bedstead which I have had since college and which will last me until I die, it is that sturdy, and a cedar chest which my dad gave to my mom for her nineteenth birthday and which holds quilts which were given to the children by my grandmother and which they will take with them when they establish houses of their own, and of course, the family pictures and those sterlite boxes.


Elliot sat on my lap this morning at breakfast while I took a few pictures of the boys, reminding them that when they were his age I held them as much as possible, realizing that too soon, the time of holding them, would be gone.