All day I’ve been thinking about collections. I spent the day
working with a dear friend, cooking a total of 38 freezer meals for our
families and another dear friend who recently had a baby. (We may be sort of
generous in our definition of “meal” here. Our freezer stash will help us get
through 38 main courses of meals, anyway.) We worked hard making our list,
grocery shopping in bulk, looking for deals, and putting it all together. We
have a practical collection. A fabulous, tasty collection that will feed our
families when we don’t have time to think about it. Our collection will nourish
us, our families, and our friends. I think this makes it a good collection.
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| Olivia's most recent rock collection |
My girls have collections, too. Theirs are not practical,
and sometimes they annoy me. I find myself finding new locations for rocks out
of our driveway because every rock is special and different and needs to be
saved in a box or on a shelf, later to be forgotten and tripped on when it
falls in my floor. I have to hang on to random wilty dandelions, clovers, and
other weeds Olivia picks on the way into the elementary school to pick up her
sister. If I “lose” the flower, she cries as if she lost her favorite relative.
Rosemary forms fleeting attachments to stuffed animals; as soon as she loses one
of these precious friends because she dropped it in the floor while she was
busy caring about something else, she becomes an instant nag until the furball
of the moment is returned. Olivia has a collection of stickers going right now
on the window of our van, right next to her car seat. I imagine me bending over
the seats with a paper towel and Goo Gone and scrubbing a lot while my back
hurts, but she does love those stickers for now, and I guess they won’t hurt
anything.
Tonight for her bedtime story, Olivia asked me to read a
book I’ve read to them many, many times.
It’s a Winnie the Pooh book called Good as Gold. In the story, Pooh and his friends set out to chase a rainbow to
the end in search of a pot of gold. On the way, though, Piglet finds fool’s
gold, Tigger and Roo find a bird’s nest with a broken robin’s egg, and Pooh
finds the pot he wanted more than gold: a pot of honey. Owl is disappointed
because he was envisioning great riches, but Pooh eats the honey out of his
pot, fills it with rainbow berries, and gives Owl a pot and a rainbow, instead
of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And Owl learns to be satisfied with
that. It’s the experience that gives Pooh and his friends their reward, and what
meant something to one friend wasn’t the same thing that meant something to another
friend.
I know it sounds hokey, but I think I made a connection to
my girls while I was reading this book. When Roo crushed the robin’s egg and
realized how special a robin’s egg can be, I flashed to Olivia offering me yet
another pebble to save. When Pooh drowned himself in the ecstasy of found honey,
my mind flashed to Rosemary’s eyes and how they light up as she hugs her
favorite animal of the day. For my girls, it’s not the collection that’s as important
as the act of experiencing the world for the first time. Their collections
nourish their curiosity, their powers of observation, their affection for their
surroundings. The remnants of their collections may get in my way sometimes,
but the nourishment of their hearts and minds make their collections totally
worth it.
And I am now going to sit on my couch for awhile and NOT
cook anything.
What do your kids collect?
