The Summer of Joy

I fell down a rabbit hole last week and found myself smack dab in the middle of a conversation about childhood memories. It's definitely not a rabbit hole I normally let myself sniff around, let alone fall down, because maaaaaan is childhood different based on your socioeconomic upbringing.

What's that? Your favorite vacation was when you went to Paris when you were six? Yeah, well, I visited the world's largest buffalo around that age. It was in Jamestown, North Dakota and there was basically nothing else around. At all. Oh, and we ran out of gas on the way back and it was a whole dramatic (read: awful) thing.

But! I stuck around for the rabbit hole talk and started to realize something that I probably should have realized about ::check's watch:: 40 years ago. Childhood is a series of small things that lead to a bigger, hopefully good, thing for nearly everyone. As in, it's not that we think about the trip to Paris so much as the small moments that happened while we were there. In this case, the storyteller wove a beautiful tale about sitting at a metal table and eating bread with her mom. She could tell you what her mom was wearing and all sorts of details about that moment.

Her childhood wasn't about the trip to Paris. It was about three minutes of knowing that her mom saw her. Oh, and a lifelong obsession with whatever kind of bread it was. I don't know because the storyteller is still trying to chase that particular memory into the present.

I do that. I chase memories into the present. Every once in a while, I'll come across someone smoking a cigar and -instantly- my grandfather enters the chat. I think about how he smoked cigars, which leads straight to one of those little moments that somehow matter a lot years later. He once showed me how to start bean seeds in a tiny clear plastic box with a damp paper towel. What's significant about that moment? Not a damn thing except that it was a rare moment between me and my grandfather. My grandfather SUPER hated my father and held it against my mom and basically I rarely saw him. When I did see him, everything about the time was filled with judgement and ire, mostly directed at my parents, but kids pick up on that nonsense. I knew -I- was welcome, but the rest of them were welcome to go fly a kite far away from the family farm.

ANYWAY. Little moments matter. Being seen matters. All of that.

Which leads me to this creature.

Miss Mila is the Joy Chaser, as we have established. She chases joy to the ends of the earth. All of her memories will be of joy that she made because that's what she does - chases things that will give her joy.

We've spent a great deal of time hiking over the course of the past 18 months because PANDEMIC, which means Mila has spent a great deal of time picking up giant sticks, splashing in creeks, and searching for tadpoles. Those are all little adventures that come gift-wrapped with joy, so there's no point in doing anything except sitting back and letting Mila do them.

Today we went on yet another hike (we did over 20 miles total this weekend at three different state parks). It happened to be at Ohiopyle, which forever will be known as "The Tadpole and Ice Cream Trail" around our house because of that time back in the spring when Mila remembered a container for tadpoles and brought several dozen home. There's also ice cream involved with every trip there, but it's really all about the tadpoles for Mila. Months later, she can tell a detailed story about how she caught a bunch of tadpoles and set them free in our pond. They are now full-fledged frogs, which is pretty amazing if you're Mila.

And that's it. That's the story Mila will remember. Years from now, she's going to be in a work meeting (... Hopefully not a Zoom meeting, but maybe hopefully a Zoom meeting? I have sworn that I'm never going back to an office because remote is THE BEST). During that work meeting, someone is going to throw out an anecdote from when they were a kid and Mila is going to bust out her own story about going hiking every weekend and this one time we went to Ohiopyle and she caught tadpoles and then spent the rest of the summer watching them grow up and it was great.

That little stuff matters, y'all.