The Outside Wonderment of Jayden

We are outside with sticks and wonderment. 

 

When you're two, a winter-ravaged backyard is rich with discovery, and Jayden shows me this.  I may only see decomposing leaves pasted into the corners by the fence, the litter of dead twigs across the yet-to-be-dethatched lawn, and a patio in disarray, but my wonderment-expert grandson knows better.

Each stone is a surprising and precious commodity, gathered meticulously and piled in precarious heaps of protected ownership. 

Between the wet-brown leaves the rake reveals an astonishing creature, bright and slimy and wriggling, worthy of gleeful inspection.

A stick is good for so many important things, like throwing and whacking and walking.

Even a sudden gust of invisible air, lifting dry leaves in a spiral, is apparently hilarious.

I wouldn't be outside today except for Jayden.  We're together for the week, and his unrelenting need to move, combined with his love to be 'out', makes for an earlier-than-normal-for-me foray into that long held spring ritual called "clearing out the yard'.  Left to my own devices, I would certainly still be indoors until more warmth and sunshine enticed me away from my computer to address this task.
And I would be missing everything.

Even without better temperatures or more sunshine, I am keenly aware of how this being outside thing is making me feel more alive.  It's been a long, harsh winter in southwestern Ontario, and everyone is feeling it.  And ironically - and at the risk of sounding ungrateful which I'm not - I think my two times, in November and February when I was away from winter and spent most of those months outdoors in perfect Thai-dry-season, June-like weather, have actually made the months at home in the grey more life-draining than I might have felt otherwise.    It's in the contrast.

So many contrasts.  So much is vividly new in this season of my life.  Coming around this spring to complete a cycle of seasons in a year of  unprecedented change, I am myself new in ways I could not possibly have anticipated.

So now, outside with sticks and wonderment, because of Jayden, I celebrate all the little resurrections with him.
All that's coming to life in the hidden spaces beneath the winter debris.
All that's being discovered in the eyes of an impossibly curious two year old.
All that's opening and stretching and beginning afresh within my own soul.

Easter is in the wonderment.