A Day To Remember

This afternoon was just one of those days that you hope and pray you remember for the rest of your life. It was a simple afternoon of sunshine and play with Silas, but it was the kind of day that I feel like I'm most likely to forget because there was nothing extraordinarily special about it. It was just some wonderful time spent with my eldest son.

Yesterday Silas and I went down and mowed a field in front of our house, one that we had never mowed before. I could tell that the previous owners used to cut it regularly because there were no rocks or small trees to mow around. It turned out to be a pretty nice field, pretty flat with just a few shade trees and close to the pond. There's a fence in between this field and our house right now so you have to take a long way around, but the fence will soon come down (hopefully) and we can make better use of this great space.

Back to today. I took Silas, a blanket, and a pair of wire cutters down to the field after his afternoon rest. The wire cutters were for cutting down the fence, but I quickly found out that I didn't have the strength to cut barbed wire. Silas wrangled them from me pretty soon, anyways. This was a good thing, since I hadn't actually brought anything for him to play with (not usually a problem with the plethora of rocks and sticks around here).

So we went down to the field and found a nice shaded area to lay the blanket out. Silas went to work cutting down the small cedar trees, blackberry limbs, and bits of hay that edged the field. He had his cap on and a pair of sunglasses and went around clipping everything down. My nephew, Malachi, loves lopping trees and branches down, but I didn't realize how much of a boy-thing it was until today. Silas spent the better part of an hour cutting bits of grass with those wire cutters.

I laid down on the blanket and tried to occupy Chewy with fetching a stick or a rock. She mostly just wanted to be rubbed on her belly, though. She's getting better about not chewing on you so much, but she'll still gnaw on your hand when you stop scratching her belly or ears.

I laid back and looked up at the trees around me that are just now showing a few blooms. The sky was a brilliant blue with a few wispy clouds. It smelled like freshly mowed grass. Silas never went out of sight, just staying on the edge of the field and sometimes stopping to say, "Oh, this is hard work," and continuing on with his cutting.

When Chewy wouldn't bring back the stick she was supposed to fetch, I would ask Silas to get me another one. After about the third or fourth stick request he said, "You ask me to get a stick ALL THE TIME." Chewy soon got distracted by the neighbor's horses anyways.

After a long while, Silas came over and said he wanted to go inside. I still wasn't ready for this, so we played I Spy, which didn't last too long. He found some bigger pieces of hay and we played sword fighting together for a little while, but he kept cutting them in half with the wire cutters. Then he found a stick in the shape of a gun (speaking of guns, some time I'll have to write about the mean old lady at the vet...). His energy level was getting pretty low, so he came and sat next to me and we shot at all the pretend deer, coyotes, and wolves that we could find. He's getting to be a pretty good shot.

And that's what I don't want to forget: the feel of the fresh air, the sun shining through the trees, Silas in his hat and sunglasses, Chewy running at full throttle from the horses to the pond and back, and the perfect peacefulness of the afternoon. I don't want to forget my boy leaning against me with his knees pulled up, sharing a few minutes together without any interruptions or to-do lists, just focusing on being a kid with him. Perfection.