The hunt
This afternoon, for the first time in three months, my neighbor’s kids were in my house. Almost immediately, Mariana sat herself down on the concrete floor in front of my bookcase and pulled out the first pamphlet she found. It seemed that her desire to go through anything and everything that was in my house had not diminished in the past three months.
I half watched her and half read my Bill Bryson collection from my couch on the other side of the room. She moved meticulously through the bottom shelf. Working from left to right, she pulled each book off the shelf, flipped through it (I assume looking for pictures) and then haphazardly threw it to side when she was finished. I cringed at every plop of a book on the floor, thinking only of how I would have to pick them all up again when she left.
As I watched her slowly displace everything on the bookcase, I thought about what I used to do when I was her age. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered doing exactly what Mariana was doing when I was younger. Whenever there was a large stack or shelf of items that were in front of me that appeared to have not been gone through in a while, I took it upon myself to go through the papers, one by one. I don’t know if I was searching for a treasure map, some family secrets or just a piece of paper on which I could color, but I remember thinking there had to be something good in there, if I just looked hard enough.
I guess it’s different, now, when its my treasure maps and my secrets that someone else if going through.
