It’s early butterfly season and very late firefly season so, while the two briefly overlap, I occasionally drive past the house my little girl called home when she truly was one.
I think about the years we lived there and the assortment of memories that go along. It seems a faraway time that happened to other people and, I guess, perhaps, that is so. Thinking of it that way puts things into handy perspective. When we lived in the house I’m thinking of, my daughter was someone else, and so was I.
We moved to Tupelo from Starkville about the time we started having sprouts. My daughter was a baby when we moved to a home on Magnolia Drive and she was a pre-teen when we moved to the Lakeshire neighborhood where she and her younger brother grew up. Girls are almost always older than they are — a claim that will make sense to girl dads if no one else. But she was indisputably a little girl on Magnolia Drive, and that place and that time and the people who lived them all go together, and always will.
She and I spent many hours in swings – usually me pushing her in a park swing or a seat swing at her grandparents’ house in Brewer, but often in a wicker porch swing that overlooked the Magnolia Drive back yard from atop a high deck. From there, we could watch butterflies visiting the flowers, then transition to the wink and blink of fireflies as the sun slipped away to the west.
Thinking of those times always reminds me of a little note I pulled from a pack of fortune-cookie-style messages, minus the cookies, and packed into her lunch. She typically carried her lunch to school each day and, with each, she received a little note or two. Maybe a little handwritten happy from her mom or me, and often a second note from the random draw pile.
One day, amid the PB&J sandwich, drink box and envelope of cheese nips, I inserted a note that read, “Think of how truly fortunate you are.”
How much better could any seven words be? We all have our daily headaches, stresses and distractions, but a simple pause is sometimes all it takes to remember our many blessings.
The little girl who is a full-grown adult now, out in the world on her own, was a fuzzy-headed little sprout when this season arrived back then in a year that already seems a lifetime ago.
In those falls we went on walks in the back yard, listened to the birds, looked at the squirrels, talked about the meaning of it all. We sat on the porch and enjoyed the cool breeze while we read little books, sang little songs, dreamed little dreams. In the seasons that have followed we’ve caught fish and shot doves, told stories and thought up riddles: When is a green book not green? When it’s read.
We’ve taken trips to museums and we’ve explored nature trails on our own. We’ve looked at zoo animals through the fences and looked at wild animals through binoculars, and we’ve seen how they’re different and the same.
Maybe when she’s the age I am now, my little girl won’t remember the first time she saw a hummingbird or smelled a buttercup, her mind by then too full of the necessities of everyday life, but there’s a connection that was forged then that runs deeper. I can already tell, she’ll always remember those days in her heart.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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