Sarah came up with the idea of "Rainbow cards" to get Che to stop spending so much time on her I-pad as our Love-child regularly gets lost in alternative Universes like her old man but hers is more manageable.
Colored cards convey daily activities, chores and kindness that must be accomplished before Che's allowed to launch TOCA WORLD.
The "Kindness" card has suggestions of walking the dog, setting the table, writing letters and picking up trash.
Combining two, Che leads a family walk with our dog Lainey to pick up litter along the road, except she says it's GLITTER we're collecting as she dances along beside Sarah and me.
The Rainbow cards aren't necessary anymore and the family still walk occasionally but the "glitter" is still collected every day.
Well, most every day.
Lainey drags me for what Sarah calls "exercise" to get me out of the house so she can focus on a billion other things at once without me interfering, which is cool because I love outside!
Open windows and doors, sunshine, fresh air, cotton Candy clouds, a thousand shades of green, skies of every imaginable color and being part of the beauty of the earth are things I need to live!
Even when I'm feeling my worst and walking is difficult, most days I can be seen following Lainey dragging me around.
Over the months though, Lainey drags me down this sidewalk and I see Styrofoam cups, wet Sonic bags, plastic water bottles and candy wrappers rotting on fresh beds of pine straw, under majestic Oaks and tangled up in ferns.
It starts to piss me off!
It also reminds me that there was an Indian wearing a full feathered headdress crying on the side of the road when I grew up.
It was the advent of 7-11 Stores, McDonalds and plastic so Americans were learning to throw trash out of car windows.
The Indian cries watching the trashing of the earth.
Now every day I take a bag to collect trash and have grown quite zealot about it, dragging Lainey deeper into brush to dig out plastic water bottles, tampons, food containers and condoms.
There's a holiness to putting the earth back the way it was intended, as best we can anyway and in spite of how futile it seems, I feel holy, glimpsing the Promised Land like Moses just before he dies.
Oh it's beautiful!
A forest of evergreens shade blankets of pine straw and ferns on a clear, cool day, smelling of fresh rain.
Lainey stops as I snap a picture of a very tiny corner of a world as God intended it to be and I can get neither the Biblical image or the Indian out of my head.
