Mindful Ephemera

 My daughter will soon be taller than I am and what a strange feeling that will be. Everything I go through as a mother with her is as a first time mother. I will always be a first time mother. Today I opened a box and out fell the papers and photos from six years ago. There were birthday cards and art work. I remembered how in those last days in Austin, I collected what was left of her birthday last. We moved out in May. In the box I threw in school work that was returned at the end of the year, drawing the Mother's Day cards, my birthday cards. It all came tumbling out at me, dragging me back to those days and weeks before we left.

Once in Del Rio, the box remained unopened as I knew what the contents were. Then we moved into the home we are in now and I placed the box on a high shelf in the closet in what is now a classroom for remote schooling. The years passed, six years passed and I forgot what was in the box and opened it today. Suddenly I couldn't imagine six years passing, I was back in 2018. I was remembering the garden we kept at the community garden, her tiny voice coming out of small lungs. How she kept a baby voice for a really long time, until she had that growth spurt in May of 2023. I thought about a lot of things. 

As I went through the box I realized I couldn't keep everything. How I have wanted to keep a bank box for every year but that is impossible. So I picked out and curated a nice representation of August, age six, in those weeks just before we left Austin. I have the other bank boxes in my mind.