Saturday, October 27, 2007
A Rainy Saturday
Life seems to create moments and times when simple things like rain bring back memories of the days our children were young and we were known throughout the neighborhood as so and so's mom or so and so's dad. We seemed to bear no names of our own and yet we were not bothered by the new identities we had been bestowed with. Any child who called out mommy got a response from every parent within the sound of their voice, and this was comforting both to the child and to the parent of that child.
And so it was one rainy afternoon, when my youngest daughter came running into the house crying that her friend had been hurt and needed a bandaid. Being the closest parent, I ran out into the field behind the house to see what had happened. There, sitting on the ground in a puddle, was my daughter's friend crying, holding her knee, and sobbing for her mother. I gave her a hug and asked her what had happened. She told me, as best she could through her sobs, that they had been sliding down the hillside in the rain when she hit something in the grass. I looked up the hill and there, a few feet up, was a small rock protruding from the ground. As I assessed the bandaid I held in my hand and the wound bleeding on her knee, I realized that one bandaid was not quite enough to cover the wound. So my daughter and I helped her back to our house and bandaged her up before we took her home.
Life was simpler then. A Bandaid and a hug from anyone's mom could fix just about any hurt. And no one thought worse of the parent for doing it.
And so it was one rainy afternoon, when my youngest daughter came running into the house crying that her friend had been hurt and needed a bandaid. Being the closest parent, I ran out into the field behind the house to see what had happened. There, sitting on the ground in a puddle, was my daughter's friend crying, holding her knee, and sobbing for her mother. I gave her a hug and asked her what had happened. She told me, as best she could through her sobs, that they had been sliding down the hillside in the rain when she hit something in the grass. I looked up the hill and there, a few feet up, was a small rock protruding from the ground. As I assessed the bandaid I held in my hand and the wound bleeding on her knee, I realized that one bandaid was not quite enough to cover the wound. So my daughter and I helped her back to our house and bandaged her up before we took her home.
Life was simpler then. A Bandaid and a hug from anyone's mom could fix just about any hurt. And no one thought worse of the parent for doing it.
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