When I was a teenager, I always looked forward to the weekends. School days were a round robin of getting up early to catch the bus and staying up late to finish homework. During the week, I often felt like a zombie, so my weekend goal was to put some Z’s in the sleep bank.
Saturday was the one morning of the week when I could curl up under my bedspread and try to sleep until noon. That was impossible, though, thanks to my mom.
By 8 a.m., she was banging around in the kitchen which was right outside my bedroom. It was impossible to sleep with all that clanging going on and, as I’m motivated by guilt, most of the time I grudgingly got up and helped her. Back then, I wondered why she couldn’t just leave everything alone until the afternoon.
When I got older and spent weekdays chasing toddlers, running errands and cooking meals, I realized Saturday mornings were the one day of the week when I could get caught up with the dishes, laundry and bathroom chores.
Although we’re now empty nesters, old habits die hard, so this past Saturday, I grabbed my cleaning bucket and headed down the hallway. I glanced at the walls and noticed tiny fingerprints about two feet off the ground.
I recognized my granddaughter’s fingerprints and remains of the peanut-butter and honey sandwich she’d been eating while telling me a story. Then I saw my grandson’s fingerprints on the wall going up the stairs.
I started to clean those off, but then I remembered how happy my granddaughter had been while recounting the story about the princess dream she’d had.
My grandson’s handprint was made while he was learning to climb the stairs all by himself. Looking at those little handprints, I smiled for it wasn’t so long ago that I was cleaning their father’s fingerprints off walls.
In the house where my sons grew up, the bedrooms were upstairs, and when the boys came down the stairs, they dragged their hands down the side walls of the stair case.
One overhead section became a good-luck slapping charm, and all three would touch that section of the wall when they came down the stairs.
As a result, that one tough-to-paint section had a permanent gray spot from their handprints. I complained incessantly about the dirt, yelling at them to stop putting their hands all over that one unreachable spot.
But when our youngest son went off to college and we put the house up for sale, I looked at that spot over the stairs, the gho
sts of their fingerprints bringing back memories of my life when my boys were still under our roof.
We leave fingerprints all over the place in life, at the milestones we commemorate with hugs, handshakes and hearty pats on the back. Many of us talk with our hands, spreading our hands wide when asking a question and our palms thrown upward when we’re fed up.
Our hands check to see if our babies have a fever, smooth the hair away from our spouse’s face and tickle our children while tucking them into bed at night.
So I think I’ll leave my grandchildren’s fingerprints on the wall for a while. People leave traces in our lives in the most unexpected places. We can either wipe those fingerprints away, ignore them or smile and remember how the people who own them touched our souls.