Life is full of seasons. In the spring of our lives, we are protected and cared for by our parents. We grow and learn, we change and mature. We are in love with our parents, we hate our parents. We make friends with our neighbors just because they live near us. Our whole world is in the very neighborhood we live in. Hours feel like days, days feel like years, and years feel like an eternity. We are young, we are carefree, we will live on forever. In our season of summer, we have realized that we have minds of our own. And with that knowledge, we are brilliant! We become experts on certain subjects, knowing more than anyone else could possibly know about it. We are the beautiful people, the ones who are on top and going to make this world so much better than our parents – their generation truly screwed things up for us.
To everything, there is a season
When I was a kid, Valentine’s Day was a holiday to look forward to. It was a treat to wake up on Valentine’s Day to see what surprises were left for us at our place on the kitchen table. While most mornings were littered with pleas from us to wait “5 more minutes” before we got up, Valentine’s Day was treated much like Christmas – we were up before the sun. At the table there would be three places set with a little chocolate box, some candy hearts, a Valentine’s Day card, a Pez dispenser, and a new pair of Valentine’s Day socks. Sometimes there would be a little trinket, like a heart shaped glass bead on a chain or a little box with some gold coins on it. But always, there was the surprise of small treats that meant the world for us. After a breakfast of heart-shaped pancakes, we would grab our bag of homemade valentines for our classmates, excited for a day when we received at least 30 new valentines. At the end of the day our bellies would be full of candy and cookies, and our teeth coated with the sugar of little confectioner’s hearts that had messages of “Be mine” and “XOXO”. Then we would read through every single valentine to see if there was some hidden message between the lines of Garfield proclaiming his love for lasagna on a folded piece of pink paper that the cutest boy sent out to every girl in the class.
Wine Country Mom 