Power Tools and Pencil Marks

You may be wondering if I’d fallen off of the face of the Earth.  If you were to ask my children they would say we have and landed in the middle of the Boonies.  In reality it is an artsy thriving college town of about 20,000, filled with great restaurants and only 30 minutes from a good-sized city.  I'll let them have their gripes during the transition period if they aren't actively wallowing in self-pity.  In almost all categories, this move was a step up in our standard of living. That is not to say that there weren’t a few pangs of nostalgia even on my part. 

On the day of my final move-out inspection I returned to our "old" apartment for a few items I had left behind and to check that the cleaning person had done a sufficient job.  Regardless of all of the things that I did not like about living in that smallish apartment, I can't deny that my boys and I had grown a lot in those four years.  As for me, I learned how to really be independent.  At age 40, I worked through (although did not eradicate) my fear of the dark and my aversion to sleeping alone.  I learned how to ballroom dance, studied Shamanism and began to write again.  As I walked through the apartment, I saw the plethora of holes in the walls from my fledgling attempts at drilling screws into drywall to hang art, mirrors and drapes.  I remembered feeling empowered the day that I bought my drill and other tools.  As for the boys, two of them turned into young men, and their younger brother is no longer a little boy.

Their emotional strides are recorded in my memory.  Unfortunately, my memory records things much like an old LP complete with scratchy white noise and the occasional scratch that skips part of the track.  But enough remains for me to enjoy and to recount back to them when the time comes. Their physical growth was marked in pencil in the doorway to the kitchen.  Little lines with initials and dates.  The latest marks showing my oldest at 6 foot 3 and the youngest passing the height his other brother was 4 years ago.  Whenever they were called over for a height check they would exhibit the best posture ever--seemingly gaining inches in an instant, wanting the number to be an high as possible.  Straining to grow.  It was sad to walk away from that doorway.  I thought about taking a photograph of the writing, but I knew that it would not be the same.  The pencil marks hold little value without perspective of height from the ugly linoleum floor, without the fingerprinted refrigerator covered in magnets, without the sound of growing boys asking "What can I eat?"