one man's trash....

It started when he was about 2 or 3. Somehow, no matter where we were, Jack had a stick in his hand. He found big sticks, little sticks, straight sticks and curvy sticks.  He brought them home and put them in a pile in my front entry (which really is used more for collecting outside playthings). His stick collection grew and grew until finally it was so big I could hardly open the front door. About a year ago I discretely moved it outside in our flower bed (read: weed and root bed). By then he had moved on to collecting rocks and leaves. I always thought I would take a picture of that stick collection, but I never did and the maintenance men came and hauled it all away. (I guess it was unsightly or something.)

Jack was devastated when he found out. It didn't stifle is affinity with collecting things, though. He has just moved on to something else: trash.

He calls it treasure though. He finds bottle caps, old cups, broken pieces of string, various shapes and sizes of lids, and containers. Oh, how he loves containers of stuff. Inevitable all this trash ends up in my house, taped together in some sort of creative conglomerate, or put into an organizer (which also is garbage).  One afternoon this summer, he took a mini muffin container and in each compartment he had a treasure: a broken marble, a pine cone, a little yellow flower, a piece of string, a penny.  He carried his treasure box around for days. Lately he taped trash onto a box and called it a robot: broken hangers and beaded necklaces dangled from it, tiny lids were its eyes and a scrap of paper his mouth.  The other day he found an old plastic cup on which he taped various things, including a dried up glue stick, and called it a rocket ship. They are now all sitting at the kid's craft table:

I often want to tell him that it is trash, to get rid of it, and to throw it away. Every once in a which I check myself.  This is my sweet little boy who is finding joy in something simple. Perhaps, instead of correcting him, I need to take a lesson from him. To create things from insignificant pieces of the world around me. To not let others determine what I find valuable. To see little things as treasures. To find and store up little things and to love them.