Centering myself in the present moment and feeling gratitude does not come naturally to me. Too often, my mind is replaying past conversations or planning future obligations. Pen and paper help me fight my way back to the present. Purposely listening to conversations in this house with the object of writing them down grounds me in the here and now.
I often find these scraps of conversation I have penned laying around the kitchen counter, my bedside table, the foyer dresser.
Just today, I found some hoarded words, saved and then forgotten from FOUR years ago.
11 yo Sidney —– “Dad, do you remember that night I got sick and threw up on the floor? And you wiped the floor with your socked foot?”
6 yo Rachel — “Mama, the potty is eating. It eats . . . . . . . “
11 yo Sidney — “Mom, the icons on your computer have been moved around, but it isn’t my fault. It is Bill Gates’ fault.”
And upon hearing me brag about how I fit all the garden produce in the freezer, 9 yo Lincoln — “Mom, you are ORGANISM woman.”
Four years — a breath, a lifetime.
The 11 yo boy who ratted on his Dad’s cleaning methods and messed with his Mama’s computer icons is today a 15 yo boy who sits at my kitchen table taking apart a nonfunctioning LED light bulb and talking to himself, “MAN, it is nice to have a voltmeter in the house.”
Prairie Sings 