CHILD IN ME

CHILD IN ME

just when i thought i was getting old and jaded, i caught a glimpse of the little child running around in me tonight.

since my parents were out for a meeting, i thought i’d be a good kid and clear the driveway for them. they bought a new snowblower and i’d never used it, but i reasoned, if my mom can use it, i could probably figure it out. so i put on my dad’s big down parka (complete with the fur trimmed hood), ski gloves and boots and set to work. getting the engine to start was relatively easy since the instructions were on the machine, but getting it to blow the snow was another matter. after a couple tries, i resorted to using the shovel. of course, if you’ve ever seen my house, we have a really big driveway that can fit like eight cars, so after shovelling the space of maybe one car, i got tired. putting down the shovel, i looked at the snowblower again and realized my previous mistake. so i tried starting it up again. but this time, i must have tried at least 20 times before the engine fired. i finally got the thing to work, and i cleared a path wide enough for a car to get into the garage when it suddenly died on me again. and restarting it just was not happening. so in the end, after an hour of labour and two knots in my back, i had a rather amusing path that went from the street to the garage door – just wide enough for one car; half blown by machine and half hand shovelled.

looking at my work, i saw that it was rather pathetic, but it was also something i was quite proud of. i felt very much like a little child, who’d tried something beyond her capabilities in order to impress and please her daddy (sorta like the three-year-old, trying to make “breakfast-in-bed” but spilling the milk and dropping all the eggs in the process). and i realized that in my life, i do that every day. i throw my energy into projects and people, hoping to touch the heart of my Daddy – even though i know what i offer is so sloppy and haphazard. all to gain a smile at the end of the day.

on a side note, after i put the machine and shovel away, i found a nice empty patch of snow, lay down, and made a delightful snow angel. :>