Honea Express

I have sand in my shorts. It is in my ears, on my feet, and dancing along my keyboard. It refuses to leave me alone. It is glitter’s redneck cousin, rough and coarse, with serious abandonment issues. It clings like magnets and lovestruck.

Atticus and I have spent the day in the sandbox, burying our feet, digging tunnels and discussing the mysteries of life, such as why the wind never stops blowing (or crying “Mary” for that matter) and whether or not robots have bellybuttons. It is rather heavy stuff for an almost 4-year-old, and often he would gaze off for a moment, I assume to collect his thoughts or perhaps how best to humor me.

Before I went outside to join him I was doing the things of house and home, washing dishes, doing laundry, drinking coffee and of course, writing so many blog posts. The duties of my domestically.

I spied him, alone, save his imagination, out the window. Play was moving along at a rapid rate, paced by my boy and a box filled with toys and dirt. It was passing me by.

I glanced over at the chalkboard that hangs in the kitchen. I had recently erased the words that had slowly grown one over the other during the course of the past few years. Phone numbers, names of people that borrowed books and never returned them, the slight ghosts of long forgotten grocery lists, these were the fodder of the board, and we ignored them with the indifference that they demanded.

I replaced them all with but a few items, quick and simple suggestions in checklist form that I should rise to meet each day: play, read, learn, work, be healthy, love, imagine, and, for icing, I added a little box marked beer. Sometimes you have got to sit back and enjoy a cold one.

These words, I vowed, would not be ignored. I looked at the work in my hands and again out the window at my son and his understanding smile. Work? Check.

I went outside and spent the day in the sandbox. I am covered by its contents, and I am filled with its happiness. This list, it’s a good thing.