Missing mystery

Sitting here alone this morning, I sip my coffee and watch Oreos sprint around the house. I'm not sure what inspires her to gallop from one end of the house to the other, maybe she's happy that I'm home, or maybe she's just missing some key cat components and is actually in fear for her life as she flees from some imagined danger. She has just arrived on my lap, and is rubbing her jawline on my hands, and arching her back into my keyboard. It's difficult to type, but nice having her here too. Her head twitches from side to side as she marvels at things in the room that don't even catch my attention anymore. Sometimes it would be nice to have everything be so mysterious again, to have life's simpler joys like birds and plants always catching your eye and ear; like being a kid again.

I remember a cold New Hampshire day when my daughter was two. We went for a walk, and were sitting under a tree out of the rain. She saw a house, across a field, that had a candle burning in the window. "Don't touch it," she said, "it's hot." That perspective made me smile, and appreciate her thought process. All I could think was that my dog would probably knock the candle over while we were sleeping, but her perspective was limited to what she knew about fire.
This inexperienced innocence allows kids to fully enjoy life's mysteries, and to gallop around, all smiles and hair flying in the breeze.

Sometimes I wish I were earnestly compelled to gallop around the house and take joy in all the simple things. I would smile and point, and my receding hairline would fly in the breeze, and it would be okay, not weird or disturbing. Maybe I'll lose my mind while I'm still young enough to take advantage of my fitness, and do some galloping.

I think that as adults, we've seen most everything, and been exposed to a side of life that we could have done without ever knowing about. Funny though, that even with our experience, we can't seem to stay away from the things that we know are "hot," which is why we know so much about diets and recovery.

Well, Oreos paws smell as though she may have been unsuccessful at burying her poop again. I guess I need to wash her up and fix the mess: and this is how we become so seasoned and lose our innocence, always cleaning up someones crap. It's a crap shoot. I guess my parents lost their youth by cleaning up my poop, and now I've lost mine in the poop of my kids and pets. It's all part of the poop cycle.