I Miss . . .

Lupo’s hot dogs . . . sleeping in on weekends . . . the excitement of my kids when they were little and we were about to embark on an adventure . . . soccer games . . . Saturday morning cartoons . . . my hair when it was so long it wrapped around my arm in my sleep . . . how pretty I was back then and didn’t even know it . . . that being-pregnant glow . . . rolling in the grass at any excuse . . . chasing lightening bugs . . . being the age where every party I attended involved wearing a hat . . . summer days at the play ground . . . drive-in movies . . . cruising with no where to go just loving being on the move . . . all my firsts . . . the anticipation of a school dance . . . Easter Egg hunts when I wasn’t the one hiding the eggs . . . roasting hot dogs and marshmellows on a stick . . . being small enough to be thrown into the air and carried sleepily from the car at the end of a long day of sheer joy . . . believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy . . . getting a new outfit at Easter . . . the beginning of being a freshman and the ending of being a senior . . . being read to . . . when everything I needed was near enough to walk to . . . walking home after school with friends . . . giggling on the phone with friends after walking or driving past the house of the most recent boy crush hoping just to catch sight of him . . . hanging out at the swimming pool all day . . . the smell of Grandma’s cinnamon buns in the early morning . . . having a posse of parents and grandparents have my back no matter what . . . Grandmother Bertha chasing those bullies away with her cane and 1st grade teacher voice . . . 

Seeing Slower

Slow down!

You’re going too fast!

The bywords of the old to the young resonate in my ears of late.

I am driving slower these days, not because I want to, but because I’ve got way too many speeding tickets for anyone who wants to keep driving these beautiful country roads.  You’d think I’d see more, notice more, but I don’t.

I tend to live way too much in my head to notice the beauty around me unless I first slow down my thoughts and force myself to pay attention.

It’s a gift of the really young and the really old, this paying attention to the world around us business.

Young friends run head long into life.  Yet even at their warp speed, they manage to see everything – really see it all.  So the running child comes to full stop in a nanosecond to investigate the worm or leaf or ant or clump of oddly shaped dirt that has captured their attention, before running off to the next moment.

And my really old friends simply stop and look, taking it all in, savoring each sight as if it might be their last – because it might really be.

The first look and the last – each the richer for their uniqueness.

Why does everything in the middle get so easily taken for granted?

Because I don’t know, I slow down a bit today and stand with my old friend and simply gaze at the rain laden fog hanging suspended in the crease of one mountain folding into another.  We marvel together, arm in arm, and then move on, richer for the moment.

I think I like this seeing slower.