I'm sitting here on this sunny Tuesday morning, sipping coffee and thinking back on the last three days. We had a full weekend. Days and nights spent up in Maine with my inlaws. Kids swimming in the pool, the smell of chlorine lingering still. Tide pooling. Scraped legs, green from sliding down rocks covered in algae and seaweed. Ice cream and crab cakes and chowder and cookies and donuts. The good life.
Also? My oldest lost his first tooth. In Maine. At an ice cream shop. He was chomping on an ice cream cone and told me his tooth hurt. I peeked in and low and behold it wasn't the tooth that is a teeny tiny bit wiggly that we've been paying attention to for months, but one on the bottom that we had no idea was even remotely on it's way out. Two minutes later his face changed, bewildered, mid chomp, and his tooth was out. The tooth fairy made a very special stop that evening.
All this and I'm left thinking about how often we focus on something that is not really the issue, or the thing that warrants all this heavy thought and concern, when life simply happens the way it is meant to. Throwing us curve balls when we least expect them, and then realizing these events that simply happen without our intervention are the big ones. The real life events that make up our existence regardless of our interference and meddling. Leaving us with how many moments spent, exhausted, on unnecessary thought and worry, trying to create our own issues.
Sunday morning, before the gaping hole in my sons mouth emerged, the two of us spent an early hour at one of our favorite beaches. A little stretch of protected dunes and sand and tidepools. We threw rocks, collected shells and sea glass. And we visited some trees that had washed ashore that we visited months ago. We saw the changes that just a few months {from our last visit} of weather can create. The wood softened, the driftwood sculpture half covered in sand, the exposed edges painted with textures and shadows. Statues on the beach, talismans of the magic of nature and time.