Found in my Pockets

I opened my glovebox the other day and several feathers fell out – grey and white and a bit warped, perhaps folded when stuffed into the glovebox, or maybe crushed by a sandal on the beach before my daughter found them.

My daughter Skye is three and is an exquisite curator of an endless exhibit – her treasures, that she sometimes generously bestows on me or my husband, or occasionally another lucky and adored recipient. Sometimes she whispers: “It’s a treasure for you,” as she slips a smooth white stone into my palm or a rhinestone that has fallen off a plastic tiara.

“Thank you!” I exclaim too loudly, too enthusiastically, eager to prove myself worthy of the gift.

More often, Skye silently leaves these treasures to be discovered, as she did on Sunday. We woke to the half-light, blinds still closed, her small form walking quietly around the room, placing tissues festooned with hot-pink post-it notes on our bookshelves, our nightstands. When we asked what she was doing, she shushed us, and then said, a bit impatiently: “Decorating.”

I feel something spiky in the pocket of my apron and find sticks, desiccated wild flowers, a plastic horse. I open my glasses case and chestnuts spill out. The location of the glasses remains a mystery.

I recently had a minor tiff with my husband because I let my daughter fill his smoothie bottle with shells from the beach, including some with rotting mollusks inside, which made our house stink of death and forced us to throw away the smoothie container (I ordered him a new, admittedly inferior, one online). The thing is: I knew they stunk – I knew it was a bad idea to keep them, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away, not after she had convinced not only herself, but me, that they were precious treasures of the highest quality.

She was right. They are precious. They are also trash.

I found a lock of hair on our bed last week. I know she located the scissors in my desk drawer and cut a lock of her (or I suspect her brother’s, which looked a bit uneven) hair and left it on our duvet. I keep moving the lock around – to the desk when I make the bed, to the shelf when I clear my desk – but I couldn’t throw it away. Finally, I tucked it into a small notebook, with the daydream that in twenty years from now, when my kids have moved away to forge lives of their own, I will come across this lock of hair and recognize it for the prize that it is. I will hold it tightly in my 20-years-older and slightly spotty hands, bring it to my nose, stroke my cheek with it, how silky their hair was at two! But more likely I will forget about the lock, give away the notebook in a purge of our ever-growing book collection, someone will open the book, throw away the mystery hair, perhaps with disgust.

But I can’t betray them to the garbage can. When I compost dead flowers and the disintegrating pine cones, take the stones from my pockets and return them to the garden, it feels like the passing of little funerals. I know, just as I know the leaves and sticks in my car are disintegrating and must eventually be discarded, that their childhoods are doing the same. Part of me wants Skye to be forever barefoot, wearing  a crown of dry leaves and plastic rubber band bracelets.

In my slavishness to this desperate feeling, I have become a bit irrational, even a degenerate neighbor, for while I try to help Skye distinguish between “wild flowers and planted flowers,” I am guilty of turning a blind eye when she snaps the head of a peony or tulip in a neighbor’s garden. I cannot bear more than “Thank you, it’s so beautiful,” and hurry us behind the next hedge.

A few weeks ago, she announced she wanted to make a necklace of seashells for her grandmother’s 70thbirthday. She collected them at the same beach of the fated stinky smoothie episode. She proudly hauled a bucketload home, and my husband painstakingly helped her clean them, select the best ones, and he drilled a tiny hole through each to string them on a wire and create an objectively beautiful seashell necklace, that my mother wore to dinner the last night of our holiday.

My tears were not because of the loveliness of the wild object – though it was - and not because of seeing my mother wearing my daughter’s creation – though that, too, was lovely.

But because I know that at some point my daughter will pick the last wildflower for me.

She will slip the last stone into my palm.

I just don’t know when it will be.