The Perfect Gift

Not to sound trival, but gifts come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you can see them coming. Sometimes you don't.

Yesterday my middle child came home from school complaining of a headache. When I reached over to give her a hug, my arm wasn't even touching her when I could feel the heat emminating from her body. "Get the thermometer," was all I said.

Two minutes later, and a temperature of 101.4, I called the school, reported her illness and told them she wouldn't be in school the next day, today, my birthday.

Last night, as I was falling to sleep I wondered what today would bring. Would I get to work on the last of the three doors I need to strip? Would I make headway raking up the pine needles that are raining down from our trees?

Five years ago, my middle one took it upon her self to close the lock on a foot locker I had been lugging from life to life since 1978. I remember getting mad and yelling, "NO, I don't have the key." But it was too late. The latch was locked. Not wanting to deal with it right then and there, the foot locker was pushed to the side and over the years buried under life's other essential valuables.

Every year we have a Halloween party. Where we decorate the house like crazy and the kids get to invite a few friends over to carve pumpkins, play games, and eat Halloween food like Cheesy bat biscuits, Eye of Newt sandwiches, jello brain and the highlight of grossness , Litter Box Cake. This year, for the party, we decided to set up an area in the kitchen dedicated to Harry Potter. We set up brooms, wands, glasses, a cape, and a snitch. As we were looking at our little display I remembered the old foot locker. "Let's unbury it, and pretend its Harry Potter's." So we shifted heaven and earth and dragged it up from the bowels of the basement. The lock was still holding fast, but it didn't matter. It was the prefect flat surface for a friendly game of Wizards Chess.

This morning, the oldest and youngest off the school the house was quiet except for a little bit of hammering that I thought needed investigating. There in the kitchen was the feverish one with the meat tenderizer banging on the lock. "Mom," she said, "I might be able to get this open."

I smiled, and left to find our oversized screwdriver that has more uses than the boring task of turning a screw. Meat tenderizer in hand, screw driver poised, the two of us hammered until the locking plate hit the floor.

Inside was my life. A life I hadn't visited since my post graduate days. There was a rather professional looking slide presentation on my forays into Molecular Biology and using a gene gun to blast DNA into unsuspecting plant cells.

There was a hefty stack of overheads I had used to present my work on using Pseudopotential Theory to calculate the bond angle, and length, of a hydrogen bond created between a pair of water molecules, to a group of pure solid state physicists in Belgium. There was something in my hand writing about Hartree Fock, Electron-Electron coulomb energy and The Hamiltonian. I had filled three overheads with more Greek letters than I ever thought or remembered I knew.

Inside the chest was a mountain of stencils (plus all the brushes and paints) I had created of all different kinds of animals after my oldest one was born and I wanted a crafty diversion until I returned to work.

There were patterns I had drawn for building planters that looked like a Pelican, Canada Goose, and a Great Blue Heron.

We laid everything out on the floor. It was fun to watch my middle one looking through my sketches and stencils. She seemed amazed that I might have had talents beyond folding the laundry or emptying the dishwasher.

Then my little birthday buddy asked if she could stencil one of her shirts. I felt her head, the fever minimal at best; I nodded okay.

We spent the rest of the quiet, peaceful morning putting a horse stencil on her shirt. It was the best birthday present this Mom could ever ask for.