MINUTES FILLED WITH DAYS

Kids can fill minutes with anything, like when Kaya came for the holidays and one of her big wants was to play in some leaves, as she always does in autumns at our house - which was still possible since there's been no snow - so I took her out into the garden to where all the late-fallen oak and cherry leaves had been gathered by the rake-assisted wind.

She gathered bunches of leaves in her arms, threw them high in the air and ran through them squealing, storing up days worth of wish-fulfillment in no time at all, then I suggested that since it was growing dark we should get busy on another big want of hers and use a bunch of these leaves to roast some potatoes, so we got lots of leaves together in a pile and Kaya lit them like a little priestess at an altar; then we got some oak twigs and threw them on, then more leaves and in very short order the heat was ready for potatoes, which in 20 minutes of additional leaf-cavorting were perfect for eating with some salt while sitting on warm rocks by the embers in the falling dark.

Then yesterday we went out to trim the plum tree (Kaya always has some house and garden tasks when she comes to stay) and I got the ladder and saws and pruning shears and of course the wheelbarrow-- Kaya loves the wheelbarrow, so she was in charge of that. The plan as we initially set it up was, as I trimmed the branches from the plum tree, Kaya would take them, clip them down to size and put them in the wheelbarrow; then when it was full, she would wheel the twigs over to the garden, where she would dump them onto the compost pile.

So there we were, I up on the ladder among the bare plum branches and Kaya standing next to the wheelbarrow with everything -- ready to go, but something wasn't quite right, some essential was missing... after a moment's thought, Kaya realized what it was, ran into the house and came back out a few seconds later carrying her toy mouse, which she placed just where it belonged in the wheelbarrow. Now everything was ready.

But with all plans, we must be prepared for change. As Kaya was doing her part, she suddenly had an even better idea than our original one: she began to use the ideally sized twigs to build a fine house in the wheelbarrow for her mouse to live in, using the larger twigs for the frame and the smaller ones for the roof, with some nice roundish green leaves for shingles against the rain and snow, and who was I to object from way up in a plum tree with such a godly perspective? Indeed, from my point of view the new architecture looked attractive and functional. By the time the structure was completed the plum tree had been trimmed, the mouse was snug in the newly named Wheelbarrow Mousehouse and it was time for tea.

Though the new plan took quite a bit more time to carry out than the old plan, we're always asking heaven for more time, aren't we-- and there it is right in front of us, all along.