Small Treasures

Guest blog by Karen Pederson Travis

Small Treasures

Kids say the funniest things. Which is why as a young mother I started writing down the things my daughter, Emily, would say when she was little. They were moments that, at the time, I was sure I’d remember forever. But life has a way of flooding the mind with other things, and I didn’t want those precious memories to be drowned out. 
When Emily was two years old, I started scribbling notes in a blue, spiral-bound journal. I didn’t write in it every day. I’m not disciplined enough for that. I just captured the highlights. The moments she’d never remember—moments I never wanted to forget.
Some entries were only a couple of words, like “livinging room” or “Baby Cheez-Its” (a crowd favorite at Christmastime). Others were longer to provide context. All were written in black or blue pen, the messy scrawl of my handwriting a testament to my exhaustion.

• June 6: Went shopping the other day. You got mad at me, and when you get mad, you pinch me and say “ouch.”
• June 12: We took you to the zoo. You saw the bear and said “bear.” You saw the tiger and said, “tiger.” Then you saw the giraffe, zebra and elephant and said, “cows!”
• August 7: Yesterday I asked if you wanted me to carry you on our walk. Now you want to be carried everywhere. The minute we step outside, you raise your arms and say, “Carry you?”
• December 10: When you sneeze, you say “bless you” to yourself.
• May 22: Today you pretended to read me a story. A book on tape (without the tape). “This is the story of Pocahontas,” you said with great drama. “You can read along with me in your​ book. You will know it is time to turn the page when you hear this sound…beep!”
• July 6: You love grocery shopping. As we walk through the aisles you explain to me, “I love cookies” and “I love donuts.”
• July 10: We went to a baseball game last night and church this morning. When the organ began its prelude, you stood up in the pew and began belting out “Take me out to the ballgame!”
• August 10: At dinner, you said “Look Mom, I’m a camel.” Then you just sat there, staring blankly at the wall, not making a sound. I’m sure in your mind, using your imagination, you were, indeed, a camel.
• October 20: Today you asked me to marry you.
• November 15: When you don’t like something, you think it’s “gusdusting.”
• June 30: Tonight, you asked me: “Can I come to your bed for a couple of whiles?”
• October 16: We were walking through the cemetery by our house the other day and a gust of wind blew the leaves in a swirl in front of us. “Leaf fight!” you shouted.
• December 14: “Mom, can we go on a rocket ship to Mars sometime?”

I kept writing as often as I could, adding a few mementos between the pages--a note to the tooth fairy instructing her not to take away the baby teeth, home-made Mother’s Day cards, drawings, a few photos. Fragments of childhood and motherhood, our lives deeply intertwined.
Until one day, I stopped. I hadn’t planned to. I don’t even remember doing it. I just remember finding the journal in the back of my nightstand. I opened it up, dusted it off, and realized it had been years since I’d made an entry. I wondered how many memories had been lost in that time. My nest now empty, I missed the little girl I spent so much time raising.
With no way to reconstruct the past 22 years, all I can do now is thank my younger self for taking the time to capture those moments. And every so often, I sit down in the livinging room to re-read the journal for a couple of whiles, and I can’t help but smile.

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Karen Pedersen Travis is a retired communication consultant, a mom, and emerging writer. She received a BS degree from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and now writes creative nonfiction from her home in Eden Prairie, MN, with her husband and two aggressively loving golden retrievers. She is currently working on a book about her experiences growing up in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, where her parents worked as Lutheran missionaries.