Children, Still Under Warranty

Yesterday’s post on Seuss’s book about growing old and irrelevant arose partly by the fact that the book was sitting within reach on my desk. The other choice of blog posts surely came from feeling old and irrelevant–an obsolete child, in the good doctor’s words.

And perhaps some of that funk derives from the emptiness of the house now that the grandchildren and our daughter’s family have left for the coast. There are still remnants of that brief and pleasant storm that passed through from South Dakota.

At last word, the girls, both somewhat anxious about what they were going to in their new world, were delighted to find that now they would live, like Granny and Dumpa, in a place where they could play in the water. They would get to know the smell of salt spray, chase fiddler crabs, watch pelicans dive and run from the waves. And they have exchanged blizzards for hurricanes.

We live vicariously through our children, who remind us of the smothering alarm of a bucket of water up our noses on a summer day, the feel of wet grass under our toes-es, and the possibility of every moment. Those possibilities dim when they leave, and it takes a while to relearn obsolescence and be content by still waters.