Playing Kathy and Dick

"Sassa, let's play Kathy and Dick."  And so Michael and Melissa, then four and three, would head for the nearest table or a large closet, where they would set up "their kids" -- their Cabbage Patch babies all in a line -- and go on a "road trip".  (Robyn, age one, would wait a year or so before they would entice her into the dog's crate, and take her along on one of their vacations.  The dog, a willing player in this tableau, had a car seat with their babies.)   They would stop for gas, stop to console, feed or change crying babies, discuss the weather, the traffic, and  their various destinations.  My husband and I got to see a play back of ourselves in the eyes of our toddlers playing us.  Would this have gone on forever.  Well, not the Robyn in the crate part...

Thirty years later, it is I who feel like I'm playing at being an adult.  Now we talk about how the grand daughters are doing in school, the upcoming birth of our first grandson, the illness or passing of friends....  Lately words and phrases such as "stage four", "terminal", "hospice care", all in reference to my husband's mother, have crept into our dialogues.  How we long for the sweetness, the innocence of those earlier days.