Our daughter is travelling through New Zealand.  It takes a lot of guts to set off for strange shores with nothing more than a knapsack and Netbook.  Then again she’s been trained well just being our Kid.

One summer day, she may have been about 7 or 8, we went for a walk through the fields on the farm.  With the time to talk about everything under that sun, she asked why the sky was blue, the grass green and what were those little red berries tucked under the alfalfa.

“Those?  I don’t know.  Let’s see?”  I plucked one and popped it in my mouth.  And toppled over.

She shrieked.

I opened one eye.

The rest is a story of how her school teachers for many years wondered how to call Children’s Aid to complain about my perverted sense of humour.  In my defense, my sense of humour was finely honed to protect against her father’s and her own twisted views on life.

triple ginger cookies

I like to think that through the trials of being our daughter, she has picked up a few survival skills.  Baking awesome desserts is one.  Writing incredibly well is another.

She posts on her blog – though not as frequently as her fans would like – missives from the North and South Island.  Interspersed with the posts are “The Becca Chronicles“.  Way too racy for a mother to read; but I do because that’s what mothers do.  Dad, on the other hand, just mumbles about the Southern way of managing things.

Crow’s Nest is one of her latest posts and it really caught me.  Of course, it’s about books… after a fashion.  Or maybe, more accurately it’s about the loss of dreams and wishes, the things we build and infuse with hope which then languish from lack of sustenance or fail from things out of our control.

I’m sharing it without her permission – but then I’m her momma and she’s the one who taught me to colour outside the lines.

The Kid’s Mom

The Kid decking the rose garden for me