I must confess, sometimes my heart gets restless and begs to wander. It whispers, wildly, "let's run away and be young together forever." It isn't an altogether unwelcome idea...I have always been drawn to the idea of roaming, living freely and going wherever the wind blows me. But that type of life clashes terribly with my reality. I am rooted. I always have been. I sink myself into what surrounds me and I grow up around it. But everything I love about my hometown and the people that inhabit it is also everything I hate: it's smallness, it's familiarity, the people I've known my entire life. I cherish these things, but they can sometimes make me feel stifled.
I was mulling over these very things the other day when my sister called and said that her wedding invitations had come in and they needed to be addressed and sent out. It's funny isn't it, the way the little moments are the ones that end up being the most important...We had been addressing wedding invitations and singing loudly over the din of six children playing with my cousin and a few friends when my eldest nephew came to stand next to my chair. He started to sing along in the way that 2 and a half year old's do, sort of humming along to the melody and punctuating it with the occasional known word, all smiles and wiggling limbs. I scooped him up into my lap facing me as the song changed to Phillip Phillips "Home" and sang it with him. I am no singer by any stretch of the imagination, but bouncing that tiny little universe of a human on my knee, seeing his eyes alight with the kind of awe and pure glee that only a child can know...for a moment, I felt like I was something special. In the space of a heart beat I knew that I could travel the entire world over, see every breathtaking vista and indescribable sunrise; every awe inspiring habitat and national landmark, and nothing would ever be as beautiful as that smile. This is not to say that I don't want to see the world, I do. And one day, I will. But sometimes, what is right in front of you is more than enough.
