We had a houseful over Father’s Day weekend, with both kids and their sweeties home for a joint wedding shower. The weekend with them was pure joy. Our two old children and our two new children are thoughtful, kind, loving, and well-mannered. Watching them, I marveled at their maturity and wondered what had become of the kids they had once been.
As the weekend progressed, their younger selves peeked out from their grown up blankets. Our new daughter fussed over and mothered her dog, a reminder of her childhood propensity to carry a baby doll where ever she went. At the wedding shower, our new son pinned a bow to his shirt and struck a comic pose reminiscent of the super heroes who fascinated him for years. When our long-time cousins arrived, they started talking a mile a minute, like they’ve done every time they’ve been together for years.
But we’d held a competition about who revealed the most childhood self during the weekend, our long-time son would have swept the vote. He dressed for the wedding shower in clean blue jeans, a cream-colored western shirt, black cowboy boots, and the new cowboy hat his wife bought for his birthday.
Talk about a flashback.
For the first three years of his life, we lived with our son in cowboy country. As soon as possible he graduated from overalls and onesies to cowboy clothes. He wore his blue jeans with pride, wore out several pairs of cowboy boots, and wouldn’t leave home without the big, old cowboy hat Gerald Burghduff gave him one night at a school program. Even after we moved to Iowa, our long-time son insisted on a new pair of boots whenever we went to visit our cowboy friends in South Dakota.
During our weekend together, all four of our young adults revealed bits of delightful children they once were. But our long-time son proved a point often stated by the friends, neighbors, and students who loved him for the first three years of his life: You can take the boy out of Harding County, but you can’t take Harding County out of the boy.
