I Believe the Children Are Our Future...

...Teach them well and let them lead the way...

Ha! Now that I've got everyone who reads this stuck in an infernal fragment loop of "Greatest Love of All," I can now feel I am not the only one in this predicament.

But, really, I do believe our children are the future, at least our 5 and 6-year olds. Awhile back I got the idea to collect the contents of DJ's pockets for a week and blog about how children are natural hunter gatherers and cleaners of the world. Any brightly colored/strangely shaped/weirdly beautiful object gets immediately tucked away until I find them when I'm cleaning out DJ's pockets in preparation for laundry, or melted on the inside of the dryer drum after I forget to clean out his pockets before laundering.

Last week, the old man and DJ, along with another father-son team, went exploring in the wooded areas around Possum Creek. The above picture contains the artifacts DJ came home with from this expedition:

• Five golf balls
• Four used bottle rockets
• Two shotgun shells
• Part of an iron grate or rake of some kind
• One pair of sunglasses

Instead of scolding DJ for bringing what amounts to garbage inside our house, I'm actually kind of happy about it (after it's hidden on the back porch and can be disposed of once sufficiently out of mind), because it indicates what we could accomplish if we all followed a 5 or 6-year old's logic that everything has worth and everything is valuable. The sunglasses could definitely be cleaned up and given away (or used); the iron grate could be recycled; the golf balls could easily be thrown at passing cars. The point is, we could all be picking up detritus in our visits to wooded areas and other natural places where human contact is obvious in the trash we leave behind. I was thinking about our trip to woods behind J.J. Finley when we did this year's Air Potato Roundup and how DJ was thrilled at the prospect of picking up garbage in addition to air potatoes.