Just Watching

It's Monday morning. Sara's asked for time to work, so I've got the kids. Micah is down for his morning nap.

The morning has been the familiar inexhaustible litany of requests, exclamations, and cries from Gwendolyn. Then: something unexpected. She points to her gingerbread house, made with Granny in early December, which has been sitting on our counter for a month. I can't help looking at it and seeing mouse attractant.

"We have to put this outside for the birds and the squirrels." Squirrels still comes out like krurruls from my three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old's lips.

I have no idea where she came up with this idea. I try not to let my happiness seem excessive. "Really?"

"Yeah." Matter-of-fact. As if everyone puts out gingerbread houses on January 14th for local fauna to eat. As if it's a Catholic feast day.

We don our boots, hats, and mittens. The air is cold. Right there, outside the kitchen picture window, we lay the cookie abode to rest, a hapless victim of nature. Then we come inside.

Without a word Gwendolyn retrieves her "oggles," binoculars made out of two mismatched paper towel tubes glued together and decorated with princess and butterfly stickers (magnification: 1X). She perches on a chair next to the picture window and peers through her binoculars at the gingerbread house, six feet and a world away on the other side of the triple panes. I sit next to her, gazing into the cold January sky.

"Daddy, you need your oggles."

I reach over to the counter and pick up my pair of toilet paper tubes with DADDY inked on one side. Gwendolyn made a pair for every member of the family, including Micah, how sees cardboard only as a fantastic chew toy.

Now we are partners in the watching, our worlds divided evenly into two circles.

 The gingerbread house sits alone against the pale green and brown of early winter, a steel blue sky showing no sign either of birds or squirrels. But we watch.

For ten minutes we sit in silence. Ten minutes: a blessed eternity in my life with a whirlwind preschooler, with no words, no whining, not even the quiet contemplative singing she often does. She is too focused to speak, riveted by the expectation that at any moment a flock of birds or warren of squirrels will appear in the field of her binoculars. The moment is full of gravity and hope. We are watching.

Just watching.

She is watching for the hidden beneficiaries of this unexpected winter treat.

I am watching, silent with joy, yet another facet of this ever-new life lit by our winter window.

We are watching, together.

~ emrys