Fumigated from our home, we trudge through our backyard toward my parent’s house. These days the gate dividing our two backyards has bushes and vines that seem a bit overgrown, but I don’t complain or mention it to anyone for fear that it might be taken as an invitation to scale them back. There is a lamppost just feet from where you leave our yard to enter theirs. Sometimes I think I am entering Narnia as I dodge the barked limbs and leafed fingers to look up at this light. I wait to be met by a magical creature or to discover it’s snowing—though I never am and it never is.
Tonight, we are on our own adventure as we pass through this gate. While it doesn’t promise us Narnia, it does promise us a departure from our normal lives. How simple it is to find excitement. I am desperate to see this as exciting and not as an inconvenience. There is a thin line between these two ideas. Excitement and Inconvenience. As a mother of three boys, I recognize that there must be an age when we switch off the willingness to be excited by discomfort and we lean into the inconvenience of displacement. I see some of this ability—to see change as a novelty—already slipping from my 9-year-old’s eyes. But maybe, I think, we can reverse this aging process? I smile as I walk toward Not-Narnia and listen to the boys’ escalated chatter about the night’s events and their wonder at what still lays ahead, as we must make beds for the night in my childhood home.
It all started with a bear, as any good story does. Not the friendly Pooh Bear of my youth, walking hand in hand with a young boy. Not the dancing bear Baloo protecting Mowgli from fire seeking monkeys and sneaky snakes. This bear is no friend to young boys and has proved itself a bit of an inconvenience (for us adults) as well as a lot of excitement (for the kids). While this isn’t his first visit it is perhaps his most exciting. When my husband, who is not home at bedtime, instructs me to check the entries to the crawl spaces outside—under the children’s rooms—this evening I do not realize that the bear’s entry will mean our exodus.
Perhaps we are living our very own fairytale: Big Bear and the three bitty boys. One in which a bear enters the home of humans looking for a sleeping space just his size. But as I look at the broken-down barriers to under the house all I can think is, there is no room in this inn, bear. I wouldn’t even offer him a barn. Though, he has been known to use our cabana some days to lounge and rest, paw prints left as remnants and reminders that we might as well leave a lease agreement for him, as he will be back at his leisure.
When my dad offers to come over to assess the situation of a possible bear under our house at bedtime, I say yes because I can hear the mingling of excitement and inconvenience in his voice—there is still boyhood adventure within him that was awoken from its own hibernation with the arrival of the bear. And if I’m being honest, it’s been awoken in me too. Because even when my dad sprays bear spray under the house, and even when we all have to run from inside my home to the backyard because we are gasping for air while coughing, and even when the boys don’t fall asleep until much too late, I am on the adventure and already thinking about the joy of sharing this with you.
There will be so many inconveniences in your days ahead. I hope you can find the excitement of the adventure they bring as well.
