Then and Now

It's a nostalgic time. My big summer project is cleaning out the basement which is a deceptively innocuous phrase hiding the grim reality of making hundreds of awful decisions about what beloved and important artifacts of the past to cull and which to keep. Like the black Post-it note I pasted inside my desk drawer at Gordon Tech so every time I opened up to grab my staple I saw my instruction to myself, written in white ink: Smile for them. And the dozens of $1.50 paperback YA novels I ordered from Scholastic and gobbled up in my teens. And the eggs I marbleized for Mia's first Easter in Wilmette, chipping out a tiny speck of shell with a needle and blowing out the raw innards until my cheeks hurt. And all the letters and cards and lesson plans for Romeo and Juliet and graduate school copy packets full of smudgy readings in 8 point type and books from my parents' bookshelves. And indecipherable journals and scribble-filled notebooks and kindly-intended gifts and incomplete projects and the past is exhausting, as if the present wasn't challenging enough.

Here's something too precious to part with:

October 2005. For Mia's third farm-themed birthday, Sally constructed a cardboard lamb for the kids to pose behind for photos, with soft wool and felt ears and a real bell on a pink satin ribbon around its neck. Flower and glitter in the grass behind him as he jumps over a fence.

Here's our big ten year old this week, as Nora peeks out.

In August 2007, when Mia was four and Nora was two, we spent a week in Saugatuck, where Sally welcomed the girls with cardboard horses to gambol around the yard.

Here they are this week, still adorable, still fun. Love has no expiration date, man.