Two Touch Points

I keep a spreadsheet of addresses and jobs, the boys’ ages and mine because I can never remember what happened where.

Were we still in the yellow house or was that after we moved to Woodinville?

And don’t get me going on where the bedrooms were in each house. I need a floor plan attached to the spreadsheet.

When Thatcher was home this last time, he talked me through the Woodinville house.

I couldn’t get there, but today it came back.

I just need a minute.

The spreadsheet started because of the addresses. Yes, because we move too much, but then adding in their ages has been brilliant because that is how I catalog the time together.

Mason was in Kindergarten, or Thatcher was in 5th and we had just moved to Redmond. I took over at Hollywood Hill and Cooper was a sophomore.

I need two touch points to remember.

Mason is about to start his senior year. Haircut and senior backpack. He’s on a hunt for Skylanders not because he was a fan of them but because our neighbor’s daughter designed the coolest kid backpack sling for Skylanders when Mason was five. We were in the yellow house then, some memories stay with you because the people do.

He’ll do yearbook pictures and Senior Sunrise. We will shell out too much money for parking spots and jerseys, applications and student tickets, and I’ll be trying to place the memories into my spreadsheet. What will be those touch points?

Will it be the pictures?

For Thatcher, Leighellen came and did his senior pictures. We went back to the spot where our first ever family pictures were taken. We have him at one and at 18 in the very same spot.

By the time it was Cooper’s turn, COVID had landed, and we talked Kristen and Kaija into taking his pictures around the very place we had met and fallen in love. Mason just said, Leighellen should come for a visit.

But for senior pictures, the ones that go in the yearbook, all the kids go to a studio. Mason has a date on the calendar. I’m taken back to my time as a senior working at the photography studio. Future graduates paraded through taking their yearbook shots and their lifestyle shots, too. A rare mom would come to those sessions, I know not to go to his.

Maybe I’ll get a photographer friend to create a memory for us this fall. Maybe Leighellen can come.

And then it will be graduation.

For Thatcher’s, my mom and dad, Eric and Elliott were all there.

By Cooper’s, COVID had arrived and Dad had died the summer before. Eric brought the entire team.

In those pictures, Mason is half Thatcher’s size and then just a full head shorter than Cooper, come next May he may be taller than Tim.

For the longest time I kept adding new grades and new addresses to the spreadsheet. But now that we are settled there is much less to add.

So many more opportunities to lose track of the story.

I’m going to need a minute.

Maybe I add the dogs to the spreadsheet?