Pencil marks on the door frame capture more than my child’s height
By John Beattie
If you are a parent, you really have to know when to draw the line. Oh, and one more thing: you have to know where.
Pick any home with a child. Make it a mansion or the most minimal space imaginable and I’ll wager you will find a pencil. It’s as essential as a stove or a furnace and in wonderful ways provides an equal amount of warmth. Sure, you can use it for the icy truths of homework or timetables, but the pencil is a parent’s best friend.
And no matter how many times you’ve scolded your little one for grabbing it and scrawling depictions of sunrises and birds and fuzzy critters and friends all over the drywall, you’ve ignored the fact that you set the bad example yourself. Yes, you did it yourself. We all do it.
Ask any parent. Whether you are upsizing because you need more room or downsizing to empty what is left of the nest, there is one thing that will happen before you lock that door one last time; one thing that will happen before you pass the keys to a realtor.
You will pause for a moment; at least for a moment, and think of a wall in the home you are leaving and all it has meant to you. The home stager told you to paint over those pencil marks and you responded with a blank stare. You just couldn’t do it.
Every family has a bank of photo albums somewhere and they are hauled out when the kids are older or even later to entertain grandchildren who wonder what kind of nerds their parents were way back in the Stone Age.
But on a wall (and it’s usually a kitchen wall), there are hastily drawn horizontal lines with timeline dates that unleash a torrent of memories for parents with which no album could ever compete.
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