Welcome to Camp Funk

Sprinkles

There are days when this life is a little bottle, full to the brim of tiny dots.

 No harmony caught by my eyes.

Just so many multicolored candy sprinkles, falling and rolling and sneaking into every black crevice.

I sigh.

Oh, why?

Why doesn’t the lid stay on the bottle? Why do little hands tip it? Why does the sweeping up of the mess only serve to create more mess?

But I find a cloth, a broom, a dustpan.

Gathering each miniature colored ball, wet from the cloth and dragging stripes of red, blue, green across the floor.

My mind gathers the scattered places of our days with each stroke of the broom.

Each tiny detail. The things I forget. The lists I cross off. The list I never touch. The words I speak. The thoughts I don’t share. The beautiful. The ugly.

Sprinkles. 

So many sprinkles.

What to do with them?

I hold in my palm a tiny multicolored mountain.

Pausing. Stopping. Looking down. Actually seeing the little pieces of sweet candy.

The blue, the red, the yellow, the green.

What a colorful mess.

What is one to do with a handful of gathered sprinkles? 

Does she toss them into a pail, nothing but waste? Does she hold them under a running faucet until the color is drained from them and they slip down the drain?

No.

They may be a mixture of scattered bits.

But together… a bit of bright beauty.

Messy beauty is still beauty. 

So, we make cupcakes. And we put the last bit of still-bottled sprinkles on top.

And we call it a day.

A beautiful, messy day.