When my brother and I were kids, we spent a month out of every summer visiting our grandparents in Iowa. Our grandparents, as well as a majority of my mom's family, lived in a tiny little town that felt a whole lot like the middle of nowhere. It's the kind of town where everyone knows everyone, the houses are all adorable and perfect, and everything is green. It's Pleasantville on Prozac.
And we loved every single second of it.
Admittedly, ninety percent of the fun was just spending time with our grandparents. Even as kids we recognized how interesting our grandparents were and were able to witness the saying that "behind every great man is a great woman" in action. My grandma knew everything. Despite having four children and ten grandchildren, she always remembered that my breakfast of choice was Raisin Bran and grape juice (even when I stopped liking grape juice, I never had the heart to tell her just because she always remembered what I liked). She was always so calm (again, despite the four children and ten grandchildren) and could win an argument without raising her voice or dropping a single F-bomb and probably never had a full-scale meltdown in her life (whereas I've had two just since starting this blog...). She and my grandpa raised four kids, ran a successful business together and were always a team. Even hanging out at home with them felt like an adventure.
Speaking of home, my grandparents lived in a great house that always managed to feel homey and like a palace at the same time. I remember the most random things about it. Their breakfast table was a built-in restaurant style booth complete with red vinyl seats that sat in a windowed nook of the kitchen overlooking the wooded backyard. My grandpa was forever claiming he saw a deer out back just to divert our attention so he could snatch something off our plates (I'm sad to say that since my brother and I may actually be the two most gullible people on the planet, it worked like a charm every single time). The kitchen had one wall with about a million little drawers which housed a variety of things, including a candy drawer my grandma kept well-stocked for us, provided we didn't tell my grandpa, the diabetic with a sweet tooth, which drawer was the current candy drawer. When he eventually found it (he always did), my grandma would simply move the candy drawer and fill up the old one with boxes of raisins. It rotated all summer long, like a sugary Russian roulette. Upstairs in the closet of the room my uncles used to share was a narrow crawl space (naturally we preferred to think of it as a secret passageway) which led into the bathroom, one room down. We (my brother particularly) loved to jump out and scare the poor soul who made the catastrophic mistake of occupying the bathroom. My grandparents tried to solve the problem by putting a chest of drawers in front of the trap door, not realizing that popping out of a drawer scares someone even more than popping out of nowhere. The room that my mom and aunt shared had my favorite thing in the house; a window seat overlooking the driveway, which was the perfect place to sit and read while also spying whomever was coming up the driveway. There was an attic and basement for exploring and a great backyard to play in. I don't recall ever being bored in that house.
On weekends, we would travel up to the lake which was our favorite adventure. We spent our days fishing, boating, and hanging out with family. And if that wasn't fun enough, there was an amusement park right on the water, which is basically every kid's dream. One summer there was record rain and flooding in Iowa and we spent almost our entire time up at the lake filling sandbags. And it was awesome because it was an adventure. We never watched TV or complained that we were bored, and the only time we were ever inside was when we were sleeping at night. It's an experience every kid should have and we were lucky to have it every summer of our childhood.
Last summer I went back to Iowa for my cousin's graduation. My grandma passed away four years ago and my grandpa divides his time between Iowa and Arizona, and the town just didn't feel the same to me. I was happy to see family that I hadn't seen in years, but the magic from my childhood had worn off. Where I had once seen a wonderful place with adventures around every corner, I now just saw a town. A nice town, but just a town, a place on a map. And while it was great to reunite with my family, after a few days I was bored out of my skull. It took awhile to dawn on me that the place hadn't changed, I had.
As we get older, do we lose our sense of adventure? At some point in our lives we are young and idealistic, and feel like the whole world is stretched out before us, ours for the taking. Our hearts have never been broken and we don't know the meaning of cynicism or sarcasm. We're so open. We can turn a mundane day into a fun day without even trying. What happens to that?
A few days ago we were out getting ice cream with the kids and a little boy was in the middle of the restaurant dancing wildly to the music playing. It didn't take long before my kids joined him, as well as a few others from surrounding tables. You never see adults do that. We would be too embarrassed to do it and would be quick to judge anyone who did. Adults don't dance in the middle of a restaurant. Adults don't have fun filling sandbags or searching through drawers for the candy drawer. Even the fun adults aren't half as much fun or adventurous as the world's most boring kid.
As they continue to grow up, I want my kids to have adventures like the ones my brother and I had in Iowa. But more importantly, I want to feel like I contribute to their adventurous spirit, not take away from it. As a mom I feel like the thing I say the most after "I love you" is "Be careful" and sometimes I worry about that. I want to have the kids who dance openly in public and scrape their knees, and just stay kids for as long as possible. My grandparents helped instill adventure and humor in me and I want to pass that on to my own kids.
Bottom line: I never want to forget how funny it is to pop out of a drawer and scare the unsuspecting person on the toilet.
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