Living Large In Our Little House

Me and my mom could turn a small out­ing into a mem­o­rable time together

I have sev­eral books of quotes, a must have for any writer’s office, and sev­eral morn­ings a week, I open it just to see if I can find a new and inspi­ra­tional one.

I think the one I found yes­ter­day is appro­pri­ate for the Living Large Blog.

“Enjoy the lit­tle things, for one day you may look back and real­ize they were the big things.” –Robert Brault

Isn’t that so true? How many times do we dis­miss the lit­tle things in our life, not think­ing they will mat­ter much in the end, when in real­ity, it may be some­thing that will stick with us for the rest of our lives?

I’m reminded of one of the many times my mother and I were dri­ving home from an ordi­nary trip to the gro­cery store. It was a beau­ti­ful spring day and the car in front of us had a mes­sage waxed onto its’ back win­dow: “Seniors, we’re outta here!”

Mom got the most puz­zled look on her face and said, “What does that mean, all of the seniors are outta here, where are we going?”

She thought of seniors in the sense of our more mature pop­u­la­tion, while the dri­ver was declar­ing their excite­ment over graduating.

We laughed so hard I almost had to pull over – and it became a run­ning joke with us for years afterward.

Of course, after my mother died, I’ve thought of that from time to time and it always makes me smile. It was one of those lit­tle things, on a rou­tine day.

Sure, it is the big events in our lives –grad­u­a­tions, our wed­ding, the arrival of our chil­dren, and other big events that we auto­mat­i­cally remem­ber and grab the cam­era and video cam­era for, but it is these sim­ple, lit­tle ordi­nary things we some­times remem­ber most, like a an unre­mark­able trip to the gro­cery store. .

Another small thing I remem­ber was catch­ing one of my cousins slip­ping my brother some money at a fam­ily get together.

My brother had issues and was always down and out.

My cousin, who was a most lov­ing and gen­er­ous per­son, may not have ever remem­bered that, but it was a scene that I’ve remem­ber now for 15 years.

Recently, on Facebook, a social net­work­ing site, there was a post going around ask­ing our social media friends to post some­thing they remem­bered about us. Of course, I’m sure there were some unpleas­ant things we could have writ­ten, no rela­tion­ship is real with­out the down times, but those aren’t the things we posted.

It was the lit­tle good things.

Friends and fam­ily wrote about the fun times, gen­er­ous offers, gifts we gave.

I didn’t even remem­ber most of the small things I had a part in that made a dif­fer­ence in their lives.

I wrote on one for­mer classmate’s wall about the day after my dad died, when she brought over flow­ers and some home­made baked goods her mother made. We were friendly in high school, and were on the drill team together, but we weren’t hang­out together friends, and I’ve never for­got­ten how pleas­antly sur­prised I was to open the door and see her there.

I’ve tried to be more aware of the lit­tle things since we’ve moved here to The Little House, as I real­ize it is those mem­o­ries of the lit­tle things, a meal shared with friends, a week­end host­ing out of town fam­ily or friends, being there for a neigh­bor when they need a small tool or a gal­lon of gas that will save them a long drive into town, or maybe just how Dale and I lay in bed at night and laugh at some of the things we could be tak­ing over-seriously.

Those lit­tle things is what we’ll remem­ber for a life­time, and we’ll be remem­ber for.

What is the lit­tle thing in your life that might become one of the big things in your life, or some­one else’s life today?

On Friday, I will draw the win­ners of the sub­scrip­tions to Mother Earth News and Country Living!