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BY GREGORY J. RUMMO
LIFE IN THE BOONIES
One bright and sunny afternoon earlier this spring I noticed that my neighbor had put some stuff out by the curb presumably for the next day's garbage collection. Garbage piled out by the curb is not something that normally captures my attention but this was different.
The items were a wooden crib, a plastic red wagon, a stroller and a child car seat.
Had just one — any one — of these been left at the curb, I would not have given it notice. But it was the collection of the four, neatly lined up in a row as if the owner had a twinge of remorse and was hoping someone other than the garbage truck would come along and take them that attracted my attention.
There was a statement being made here, probably unintentional, nonetheless taken together as one, they symbolized the end of a chapter in a family's life.No more would there be the disrupted sleep caused by a hungry baby crying for a bottle at 3:00 a.m. or the need to change diapers or having to clean dried and caked sweet potato puree from the nooks and crannies of a booster seat or to listen to the racket of a wagon being pulled along the driveway or through the yard.
No. That was all over, never to be repeated again in this house.
I stood transfixed for a moment, watching the afternoon sun playing on them in shifting patterns and fleeting shadows as the breeze blew the branches of the trees back and forth overhead.
I felt a twinge of sadness myself and really couldn't say why. We had raised two boys who are now in college and we are raising two younger girls that we adopted several years ago; one in kindergarten, the other in the second grade. It wasn't so long ago that we were giving away these very same items to families who were still in the midst of making babies, and having their sleep disrupted in the middle of the night to warm a bottle or change a dirty diaper.
The impact of the curbside ensemble forced me to confront a deeper reality than that of a neighbor making the bold declaration for all to see that he was done having children. It was a reminder that life is a book, lived chapter by chapter, each one often bringing to a close a stage to which we cannot return.
Certainly I am not the first to realize this nor will I be the last.
In the 139th Psalm, the writer, David, recorded the following: "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."
Next month this truth will hit home again as we attend the college graduation ceremony of our first-born son. It seems like it was only yesterday and not 21 years ago that we brought him home from the hospital.
My mom and dad were so proud to finally have a grandson. They are both gone now, their departure having closed a chapter in my book.
And I am left with the hopes and the memories, the former largely in God's hands, the latter like those fleeting shadows cast by the sun playing on thin branches tickling across the surfaces of four childhood reminders lovingly placed out by the curb on a warm spring afternoon.
Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist and the author of "The View from the Grass Roots." Contact him at GregRummo.com
