Crayons

if you had come to my college dorm room 6 years ago, you would have:

1. been amazed and disgusted with how messy and disorganized i am

2. declared my roommate a saint (she in fact is)

3. somewhere in all of the clutter found a collection of crayons, markers, colored pencils, pastels and paints that a toddler would consider the biggest jackpot in all of the world. and all of those coloring tools would have been faced and ordered by color.

i'm not sure why, but i've always held an extreme reverence for crayons and colored pencils. despite my inability to keep any part of my life clean and orderly, my coloring supplies have always been kept neatly in their original boxes, sharpened and lined up like a rainbow. i hold these tools in the highest regard and if you were to go through my collection of art supplies, you would find the same tools that i've had for nearly a decade. and you would think some had never been opened or were purchased in the last year or two.

i'm not really sure what causes my odd affection for simple sticks of pigment. perhaps it's the nostalgia i feel for my childhood. perhaps it's a love for the arts and those things are the arts in some of its most basic forms. i really have no idea.

i rarely use them. they're too precious to waste in my mind.

but something even more precious to me exists now. something that can trump even my adoration for my crayons.

my son.

so i let him use my precious coloring utensils.

he prefers pencils. 

eventually, however, he discovered the joy of taking crayons out of the box, putting them back in, and shutting the lid. what a wondrous ability to discover! i can open something, take things out, put them back, and shut it! again and again!

but he cannot remember where the crayon came from. the simple solution here is to force the crayon into a new home.

suddenly my crayons are breaking into halves and thirds. the dog ate two. i can feel anxiety building.

my once perfect, magical wax wands now look like this:

i would be lying if i sat here and typed that my love for my son overshadowed all of the pain i feel at watching my antiques slowly meet their demise. i wince when i look at this box. it sounds silly. i know it does. 

but after my quick grimace, i look at my little boy and i smile. and i hang his drawings on our refrigerator, file them away in the rubbermaid designated for the memories he's creating, and i marvel at how amazing he is. one short year ago, if i had given him a box of crayons, i would have gotten every single one back--in his diaper. now he can open the box, pick out a specific color, use it to draw on a piece of paper, put it back where it goes, and shut the lid. that's pretty impressive. i would say that kind of skill is worth every box of crayons we have to replace. it's worth every moment i spent caring for my crayons, pencils, markers, paints, and any other art supply he ends up using. 

and i won't lose those things. not a single one. they will transform into scribbles, stick figures and shaky letters on scraps of paper over the years. they will become more than they could ever been in my flimsy hands. 

a box of crayons. 

who would ever have thought...