Joy Writers: Places

Here is the latest invitation for our Joy Writers group:

• List five places you were this summer. Write a feeling you can think of for each place.
• Write about a moment from one of the places on the list.
• Draw/observe one of the places from your list. Write what you were thinking/remembering.
• Choice-based on the list of five places.

Today we went for a walk. It was about the only outing we could muster up. Arnauld was out late, it’s fantasy football season. I was up with Rose who is suddenly ravenously hungry…all night long. Wren and Adi were in the double stroller. I had Rose in the carrier. “Can we go to the park?” the girls chirped every five seconds.

“Maybe,” I said, waiting to see what Arnauld thought about an added stop.

“No,” Arnauld replied flatly. Yikes.

The groans. The whines. We had to turn this around. “Hey! Look at this. It’s tree skin!” I said, bending to pick up some tree bark from the ground. As I handed each girl a piece, I proceeded to tell the girls about how I had never, in my whole life, noticed how bark shed from the trees and littered the sidewalks. It wasn’t until our friend Dawn wrote about it a few weeks ago, that I began to notice it everywhere. The girls were intrigued. I wondered and challenged them to see what else we could notice.

The girls kept busy for the next few blocks spotting more tree “skin”, a couple of blue bird feathers (that we hoped weren’t a trail), and a monarch butterfly following the yellow lines in the road. Suddenly the magic wore off. “I don’t see anything” followed by more whining and pleas for the park.

I had been carefully eyeing every tree we passed, hoping to spot a cicada skin clinging to the bark. I remember finding them in our yard as a kid. Such treasure. In that moment that could have brought us to the point of no return, I saw a translucent brown shell. “Check this out,”I exclaimed as I carefully peeled the left behind threads from the tree and turned to show the girls in the stroller.

Their reactions were what I would have expected. Adi cowered, hands up to her mouth in fright. Wren’s eyes lit up as she leaned in for a closer look and immediately showered me with questions. “What is it? How does it get out? Can I shed my skin? Do all things shed skin?”

We had a new mission. Operation find more cicada shells.

As we collected six more shells along our walk, the girls examining, counting, and recounting, Wren said, “This was way better than the park.”

“Way to look on the bright side,” I exhaled.