Do You Remember When You Were 17?

A few weeks ago, my dad stopped by to give me an old newspaper that featured me and my best friend, Devyn, on the cover. One of the perks of coming from a family of pack rats is that wonderfully embarrassing things from my past always have a way of resurfacing. As my dad handed me that crumpled, faded paper, I started to laugh. I remember how cool I thought it was to be in our local paper. My brother's band, Empire, was playing at a coffee house and Devyn and I always made sure to be in the front row of all their shows. But had that really been 14 years ago? The image I was looking at was of two obnoxious silly teenage girls dancing at a coffee house (I swear I wasn't doing the chicken dance (: ). But it kind of felt like it was just yesterday. Time has a funny way of allowing life to slip right past you.

It got me thinking about how strange it is that in 3 years I will have a teenager. How quickly the past few years have gone by. In a flash, I have gone from a 17 year old girl to a 31 year old woman. Every day occurrences go by and I forget. I forget how good it feels to dance to music, or to breathe in the sweet scent of my children after they've taken a bath, or how much fun it is to feel leaves crunching under my feet. This weekend I made a conscious effort to mark everything that happened in my mind. We enjoyed my most favorite kind of weekend- the kind where we stay home and do things around the house. On Sunday, we took the kids to the lake and we had a picnic and they played at the park. On the drive home, we went up and down the wondrous hills we have here in Missouri. I sat and listened to five kids laughing and squealing as their daddy zipped up and down the hills. And I thought, this is my memory. When I am old and gray and my children have grown, I will look back on this simple moment and smile. I won't always have a newspaper clipping to remind me to remember the simple things in life. But I'll remember. Oh, how I will remember.

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." -Robert Brault