donkeys

"what is she doing?" my mom asked. she was watching susanna through the kitchen window as i was preparing kabobs for her birthday dinner. up to my wrists in marinated chicken, i briefly glanced up before returning to task in front of me. "oh, she's feeding the donkeys," i replied, absent-mindedly. i moved onto the pile of steak cubes, wondering if i had enough skewers for the piles of veggies and meat that remained on the cutting board. my mom's laughter brought me back to the conversation at hand, and i then realized how ridiculous "feeding the donkeys" sounded. but that is what susanna was doing, and she'd been hard at work for a good ten minutes or so. i stopped to observe my little girl, who was doing the exact same thing she'd done for the previous five or six evenings. she had retrieved her red plastic wheelbarrow from the storage room, had steered it over to the fence, and was loading it up with pinestraw. over and over again she would kneel, gather what she could in her small arms, and place the pile inside. she then maneuvered the wobbly contraption over to the other side of the yard, set it down, and tossed out the pinestraw in small batches, talking all the while in her sing-song voice to the empty air around her. (she had informed us that first evening, upon inquiry, that she was feeding her donkeys.) as soon as she depleted her supply, she grabbed a hold of her wheelbarrow and started the process all over again. her imagination knows no limits. i could regale you with hundreds of similar stories, where i sit back and marvel at how creative she can be ... but it's finally starting to dawn on me that i can put this heightened sense of imagination to good use. i mean, she's three now. she needs to start earning her keep around here! so, next spring, when the grass is starting to grow again underneath a blanket of hundreds and hundreds of pinecones that need to be picked up and put out for curbside yardwaste removal ... well, i have a feeling that my back won't be hurting quite as much. i have this suspicion that her donkeys will have decided to move to the more scenic surroundings at the end of our driveway. and their "hay" just won't satisfy them anymore. yep, i'm thinking that those hungry donkeys of susanna's are going to have a hankering for pinecones. we might need a bigger wheelbarrow.