In an act of wild adventure, we spent the last 12 days of summer vacation in Southern California. The last 12 days as in we arrived home at 12:30 a.m. and the kids started school at 8 a.m. We squeezed all we could out of this summer.
To be honest, we wouldn’t have intentionally tortured ourselves by leaving absolutely no time to recuperate from a cross country flight and switching from Pacific Time to Eastern Time, but I ran a half marathon on Sunday, so the earliest we could fly home was Monday (and the kids started school Tuesday). It was worth it, even though we sleep walked through the first week of school.
One of the highlights for the kids during vacation was swimming in the hotel pool and watching t.v. Who needs to fly across the country to do that? Next time we’ll just get a hotel in town. Of course, we wouldn’t see Disneyland’s fireworks every night at a hotel in Michigan.
My highlight was seeing God’s amazing creations like this:
And this:
While the kids enjoyed all that too, they were enamored with the cable t.v. in the hotel room, which we do not have at home. One evening after announcing that I absolutely, positively, could not stand to hear Spongebob laugh one more time, Kedron stumbled across Diggers on National Geographic. Have you ever seen these guys? They travel the country with their metal detectors and dig up treasures in people’s yards, old battlefields, and historical sites. It was fascinating to see how in tune they were with their metal detectors. They knew from the tone of the beep what kind of metal was under their feet, and before they swiped away the dirt they often were jumping up and down and screaming, over a Civil War button, a belt buckle, or a piece of metal from an atomic bomb. What to many of us would have been junk was a complete treasure to these guys. They knew the value of the items not just monetarily, but also in historical and personal significance.
The kids were hooked. T-Rex begged to watch Diggers. He even asked for a metal detector for his birthday.
We had been home about a week, when I looked out the window and saw T-Rex and his neighbor friend huddled together in the back yard. I went back to drying dishes. When I checked on them again, they were in the same spot. Two active boys, that quiet can only mean, well, not good things. So I went out to investigate.
“Hey boys, what are you up to?” They looked up at me with wide eyes, and I noticed each boy had a small garden shovel in his hand.
“We’re digging,” T-Rex said. He turned back to what I now could see was a new hole in our back yard.
“You guys really shouldn’t be digging in the back yard.”
“But, Mom, there’s buried treasure here!” T-Rex said.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s no buried treasure in our yard.”
T-Rex didn’t even look up from his digging. “There is, I just know it.”
Then it hit me. Two boys, hunched over the dirt, with little shovels….just like the guys on Diggers. “Hey, do you two think you’re the Diggers?”
T-Rex looked up with an ear-to-ear grin and a glint in his eyes that said, “About time you figured it out, Mom!”
“Boys, I am sorry to say, but our yard is not a Civil War battlefield, and the only thing you will probably find are nails and screws from all the construction of houses around here.”
It took some convincing to get them to fill the hole in so that no one (like me) would break an ankle.
They reminded me of the Calvin & Hobbes cartoons – There’s Treasure Everywhere. They were completely convinced that if they dug long enough they would find something awesome. And they probably would have. To them treasure is in simple things like a rock that is half quartz, or a toad in the basement window well.
While your yard might not be a historical site filled with valuable, yet-to-be found treasures, I believe there are treasures underneath your feet every day in the simple, quiet, routines of life. Sometimes we are so busy that we walk right past them and don’t even realize their presence. Sometimes we might even mistake these treasures as an interruption.
A smile from a stranger. A toddler’s sticky kiss. A text from a friend at just the right time. The glint in your spouse’s eyes. A co-worker’s suggestion that turns your project in the right direction. The slight turning of leaves from green to orange.
I think I need to be more like the diggers — both the big boys on the t.v. show, and the little boys in my back yard.
There’s treasure underneath your feet. Do you have your detector turned on? Are you tuned in to the nuances in your life that reveal them?
What treasure have you uncovered this week? I’d love to hear!