For safekeeping
I was reading a book at the kid’s club of Nikoi Island when Georgia handed me a small seashell. She insisted I held it in my hand and not lose it - a task every parent is familiar with. Over the years I’ve been given many little things by her and Hannah, to keep safe just like this. Seemingly mundane objects from nature - rocks, feathers, leaves, twigs, seashells, flowers, seeds…become treasured finds in tiny hands. And when tiny hands get busy or tired, I’m often assigned the responsibility of safekeeping.
Despite my occasional annoyance at having to hold one more thing that tends to become forgotten by its owner, it saddens me to think that one day they’ll hand me something for safekeeping and that would be the last, that they’d never again hand me a rock or feather because they stop needing my help, or they’ve outgrown seeing objects from nature as treasures. At almost 10, Hannah rarely asks me to hold her finds from nature much these days. When she recently handed me some saga seeds she picked up from the side of the road, I gladly kept them in the left pocket of my linen skirt, reaching my fingers in every now and then to hear them rattle.
I balanced Georgia’s tiny seashell on my lap - an unremarkable black and grey shell with a white underside. Something about that brief moment, when she gave it to me and asked so sincerely for me to take care of it, made me miss Larry. It made me think about how I used to hand him my little treasures - not physical things, but thoughts. I could always tell him anything, however insignificant, like that tiny black seashell, and he would keep it safe. I miss that dearly. Perhaps more than anything else, I miss having someone I could say anything to - how tasty the food is, how a brief encounter with someone annoyed me, how much I’m aching after a workout, an inanely funny reel I came across on Instagram, something one of the girls said or did… and he would hold them all, without judgment.
I don’t remember the last time I got to share my trivial observations with him. Was it when he was home after a month in hospital, still cognitively lucid enough, but already distant? But I remember when I wanted to tell him something and he wasn’t there. When Georgia put her head underwater and swam a short distance without arm floats the day before, for example. Something like that would be a random red saga seed by the road to anyone else, but a treasured find to just me and him.
While taking a shower together after that swim, the girls and I talked about how papa would’ve loved to be here with us, on Nikoi, to which Georgia most casually stated, while soaping herself, “Papa is doing whatever we are doing because he’s in our hearts.” She has a penchant for saying these things that make my whole world come to an abrupt pause. I might’ve been the one that said something like that to her first, though I can’t be sure. But since Larry’s death, I have found myself telling him things, like he’s in my heart or right next to me, still handing him my thoughts, like seashells and saga seeds, for safekeeping.
My heart goes out to you all