We are playing with new Play-Doh – the real stuff not the homemade kind – and all the colors have become so jumbled together that it isn’t worth trying to separate them anymore. The palette that my sister so carefully chose as a birthday gift is now stored in great lumpy wads in a large plastic bag, quickly succumbing to the color my parents called “fludgy” when we would mix all the Easter egg dyes together into one container at the end of the process. There was always one solitary fludgy egg.
Junior Jr wants a ball; we decide to roll it flat with the rolling pin. I peel it off the table and my eyes widen.
It’s beautiful. The colors, marbleized, look full of purpose, like Italian island glass or artisanal dyed paper.
A week ago I was bemoaning the fact that we were the kind of family that couldn’t keep PlayDoh colors segregated for more than a few weeks. Today I saw in the PlayDoh a sign that somehow, somewhere within our messy lives, a beautiful thing was sneaking about.
I sing to the boys at bedtime:
oh come
oh come emmanuel
and ransom captive
israel
Let’s hope that amidst the lights and colors of the Christmas season, a beautiful thing is sneaking about.
Post 2 of Waiting: An Advent Series
