An Ode to the Kitchen Sliding Glass Door

a blog hop about what it looks like to Linger, with the ladies of Exhale Creativity

(To those here for the first time since reading my essay on Coffee + Crumbs: welcome! I hope what you read here finds you discovering a piece of what it means to find a sense of home among the stories.)

I let in the light most afternoons at exactly 3:43 pm. It illuminates the handprints on me since they’ve not been washed away for months (have they ever?) But I don’t mind really, because they used to be smaller, barely touching me from only 2 feet off the ground. If you didn’t know it, you’d think this one here right next to the lock belonged to a man. But I know, despite their size, those handprints are only 8 years old and the boy they belong to likes his spaghetti with meat sauce and just mastered his multiplication facts. His mother sits on the table I cast the light on–most afternoons at 3:43. She could clean the fingerprints off of me, but then she might be wiping away the memory of how small they once were.

Instead, she lingers longer at the table, pen furiously writing along the canvas of a blank page. She is a writer after all. She peers up sporadically, to see her three children splashing away in the backyard pool. 

She could tend to the laundry that needs folding. 

She could tend to the toilet that needs a scrub. 

She could start chopping the onions and peppers she needs for tonight’s dinner. 

She could even wash the smudges and streaks off of me.

Those things won’t take care of themselves, she knows. 

Even so, she lingers.

Because it’s summer after all and though she knows she has more than 18 summers with them, she also knows she won’t have this exact one again. 

The one where they all have a maturity that catches her by surprise. 

The one where they want to curl up on her lap to read a story before bed. 

The one where they all still fit together side by side in an inflatable backyard pool and splash the afternoon away.

So I keep offering her the view that allows her to sit there at the kitchen table, cold Arnold Palmer in her favorite glass, to let her linger long and memorize this very sound, this very sight, this very moment. 

Because she remembers how his lanky body once used to be smaller than the plastic Little Tikes slide they use to slide into the pool. And she remembers how he used to sit and create for hours on weekday afternoons when he got home from school. And she remembers when he clutched his way around the edges of the water table, enamored by the way the water fell onto his hands. 

She remembers the sight of scattered paper scraps and pencil shavings leftover from a little boy lost in imagination.

She remembers the mornings over Christmas break where they sat side by side building LEGO set after LEGO set.

She remembers when he first discovered the joy of Dog Man while eating a plateful of mac and cheese with the light perfectly shining down upon her emerging reading. 

So she lingers here, ignoring the smudges and the streaks on my glass, to memorize this moment, too. She knows the summers are coming where they will want to be somewhere else. Where a backyard pool and popsicles will no longer be the epitome of summer. 

There’s a heartbreak in watching your children grow up, so I let her linger here, where the smudges and the streaks become the backdrop of her memories.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Linger."