Wednesday 16 May 2012

God made some heads perfect, the rest He had to cover with hair...



It all started when we drove past some men chopping down a tree.  For some time we had been talking about how the trees lose their leaves in winter, and the boys had thought it was sad (Miss Snoopy too, but she calls it "shame-ies".  Really showing our heritage there!).  I was trying to explain that it is not sad, that the trees need time to rest for the winter so that when the spring comes, they can put out their new leaves and look beautiful and green again.  But the chopping down of a tree was another matter totally.  

"What will happen to the tree when it gets cut down?" asked the boys.  "Will it grow again?"
Having recently had a fish die on us, it was relatively easy to go there again.  "No," I explained, "the tree dies, just like the fish did."
"But what happens to it?" they persisted.  
"I think that its body, all the bits that we can see, go to become compost for the earth and other things can grow from it," I said.  "But we like to believe that the other part of it, the bit that is spirit, goes back to God who created it and becomes a part of Him again."
They were silent after this and I imagined that we had fully addressed a difficult philosophical point.

Later in the week, when I had put them all to bed, Sam was really upset, and, unlike at other times, when he howls his frustrations to the world, he chose to cry quietly in his bed until I heard him.  I crawled under the covers with him and held him close, and he stopped sobbing.  "Tell me the story of when we were little?" he asked me in a snuffly little voice.
Whispering, because I didn't want to wake the other two, I told him his favourite story:
"When you  boys were very small, you had such soft, downy hair on your head that every time you lay on my lap, I would pat you little heads for hours and hours.  I loved the feeling of your silky little heads under my hands. After a while, because of all the patting, all your hair wore off and you didn't have even the smallest hair on your head.  But then your hair grew back, thicker than before."  We talked and cuddled for a while more and he fell asleep.



The next night, the Sweetpea came in late after I had put everyone to bed.  I did not see it, but the light was glinting off his now-balding head, and obviously the boys took note.  
"Have you been patting Daddy too much?" asked Sam, referring to the Sweetpea's bald spot.  I laughed and said no, I hadn't.

Then Paddy piped up in a sad little voice:  "Daddy's hair must have all gone back to God," he said dramatically. 



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