This Day Rocks!

Though spring is officially more than a month away, the early time change and a welcomed break in the rainy weather seemed to lighten everyone’s mood today. Even after a wrong turn and no Garmen to show me how to get home, I chose to just go with the road while my girls kept worrying out loud over our predicament. That is until we came upon the most incredible playground alongside a marsh we’d never explored.

With dog in tow we took the path for a while hoping to see some of the birds mentioned on the welcome sign. Accompanied by Mallards and Mud Hens in the water, with incredible shape-shifting marshmallow clouds above, we followed the meandering path until we reached the far end of the playground. The girls immediately raced to this incredible apparatus, worthy of an Outward Bound course, full of kids swinging and dangling trying to get to the center of what looked like a spider’s web. One child hollered out “Como estas hombres” and I laughed at Avery questioning if the three year old had just called her a boy.

Dropping to the ground, Callie dashed to a section of the playground that seemed to be calling her name. She was immediately joined by another girl and I smiled at her mother, also pondering the instant connection. The girls, undeterred by the language barrier, simultaneously started digging. Callie suddenly screamed and lifted up her arm; her hand clenched tight in a fist. She raced over to me and opened up her wet, sandy hands. “It’s the most beautiful rock in the world,” she exclaimed. Frankly, it looked like a snail that had been crushed and rolled in sand and I cautiously touched it hoping I was wrong. I was.

Callie sat with her rock marveling at the “specialness” of it. Setting it on my bag, she dashed back to her new friend and knelt down to resume scooping. I cleaned up the rock and the few more that Callie brought with pleas of keeping them all. I sat next to the family of rocks so thoughtfully lined up and smiled at what looked like my Pet Rock collection from a craze that took over the country when I was a child. How ironic: my younger self had stormed like so many other kids to the stores searching for the same treasures my daughter had just uncovered in the sand, and in the company of a new friend.

This great serendipitous moment was not lost on my girls who proclaimed: “this day rocked” as we walked the path back to the car where my phone sat blinking with a text message from my husband wondering if we had found our way home.