Battlefield Kitchens

Bullets flew everywhere.  Bodies were flying, falling, and flipping.  The noise was deafening.  I had unknowingly walked into a nerf gun warzone.

The boys had recruited our neighbor Anya to take part in the mayhem.

Luckily, our house has a basement designed perfectly for such endeavors and I firmly instructed the infantry to move the warzone to the nearest basement bunker.  And of course, like any good soldier, they heard and obeyed...but then they forgot...three times.  I should have made 'em give me 50.  But I simply reminded them...again....and again...and again.

After the third time something strange and beautiful happened.  As the bodies and voices continued to swarm like a nest of angry hornets, time suddenly held no sway, and in a dream I saw what would be.  

The kitchen was quiet.  No voices, no bodies, no battlefield...just silence and emptiness.  And I knew in my heart that this is how life is -  when you are young, you are loud and fast, and being a soldier is easy and fun.  Kitchens can be battlefields or race tracks or anything at all.

But things change; children grow up, and the sounds of loud laughter and play fade like a mountain voice echo.  And old kitchens grow silent as they have been before.

And with the past, present, and future dancing in my heart, something small and beautiful grew in me, something that had been trying to grow for a long time.

Acceptance.  grow...grOW...GROW!

May God bless the underaged soldiers and their parents...and battlefield kitchens that always grow silent.