A Little Boy Lives Here

Stroll up our walkway towards our bright front door and notice the smiling flowers in a row along a hedge. Look closer and you may see the gap in the hedge that has become a secret tunnel to our neighbor’s house and the worn dirt path in our lawn that denotes the shortest path between home and first base, affirming that baseball is a delight that takes precedence over a perfect pane of green grass. Point your eyes upwards and you may notice the red Frisbee waiting to be rescued from our gabled roof. Peek behind the big terracotta pots holding Florida ferns and find the missing skateboard momentarily forgotten by its owner. Step over our threshold and you may trip on a few sticky quarters left over from a piggy bank heist indicating an afternoon visit from our ice-cream truck was granted a last minute approval.

Come inside and pass thru our foyer into the room that feels lived in, as you walked, you may notice the three darkened horizontal stripes along our wall at waist height of small fingers that were dragged along;  signaling a time where a search for a water source on a hot day of playing outside took place.  If you’re interested in discovering treasures, have a seat on our worn and comfy sofa, put your hands between the cushions; you may be rewarded with a really cool Hot Wheel, or a dried up lizard, a few bent up, old trading cards, or even a missing tooth. Gaze upon  our glass surfaces and instead of your reflection you may see gooey cloudy film that’s evidence of an attraction to interact with any transparent plane and transform it into opaque record of a prior fun time when mom was not  around.

Yes, a little boy lives here in our home.  His presence is hard to hide, even when he is away.  I complain about having to clean up or pick up after him, but there will come a day, when our yard will be pristine, our sofa eternally plump, our walls brightest white, our mirrors will constantly reflect a perfectly clean and neat image of a world that will be missing a little boy in our home because that little boy will have turned into a man.