Pins

This may only make sense if you've seen The Sixth Sense. So go watch it. It's a great movie.

We work with a lot of maps from time to time. Moreso in the past than recently, but we have a fair amount of maps on the walls of the office in the Mud Hut and a couple United States maps in the bedroom that I've used for various and sundry purposes (yes, for gaming too). And when I say we have a ton of map pins, I'm talking on the order of several gallons in three different colors. Things only a geophysicist would ask for. And 'older' geophysicist.

One afternoon, I left Squib taking a nap and went out to mow. We don't exactly live on one of those .25 acre sort of lots. So in order to mow all the mowable spots I have to get busy and mow for a consistent four to five hours. Even then I'm not always done. Downed branches, etc. Sometimes the POA property needs trimming, blah blah blah. So, I was out there a while. When Squib is done napping, what he usually does is slip on his crocs and run out and chase the tractor.

*Country children do not get mowed. Seriously.*

This time, though, he never came out. So I started to get worried. Worried and a little annoyed because at the time, the tractor had a clutch issue (we thought) and after you started it you couldn't stop it or it wouldn't engage the blades again until it was cooled down. That would take another day. I finally got to the "fine, dammit" point in my thought process and went into the office and it was like that scene in The Sixth Sense when the cabinet doors were all suddenly just open.

There were pins everywhere in everything. It was like they were sucked into the maps by some freakish poltergeist type of magnetism.

I swear he had a gallon of map pins stuck in all these places all over the maps and was standing at the head of my bed squinting at the map on the wall above it stabbing pins into spots as he chose them. I walked into the bedroom and stood there a minute and he turned around and smiled at me.

"Hi, Momma!"

"Hey." I looked at the map again. "Whatcha doin?"

"Oh! I'm deciding where I want to go and then when I go there I'll come home and pull the pin out!"

(Those are his !'s. He's an ! kind of kid).

" 'kay." I was wondering what Buddy would say about the holes, but you can't exactly go back on that one, so to heck with it, right? I did mention that his approach was 'interesting' because most people put pins in places they had already been to. His response was an immediate, "Why would you want to do that?"

No reason, I guess, not in this case.
Scat