Missing my little violet picker

When my daughter was little, she was always my companion and helper during violet season.  For a week or two each spring, on sunny afternoons we'd go down to the orchard with baskets and sit under the blossoming trees picking violets for drying, syrups and jelly.  During those hours, she and I would discuss all the burning questions of the day.  Why aren't there violets all year long?  Why does the dog always chase the rabbits and groundhogs?  Do bird mamas love their babies?  And so the days would pass.  Quickly.  Ever so quickly.
Eventually Aunt Susie taught her to see 4-leaf clovers, and that took her focus for a little while, but she was still around, talking and singing and chewing on a piece of onion grass.  We'd string rosebud necklaces as soon as that time came, and we'd walk along the creek and make discoveries as soon as it got warm (we usually waited until it was warm because bodies of water seem to have a magnetic pull on her - have water, will fall in).  I can sometimes convince people to do some of those things with me, but she was always game for everything.

  I used to tell her that she wasn't allowed to grow up and my mother would gasp and say, "Don't EVER say that!"  Mom had 5 of us and perhaps missed my point, having been pretty happy to have us grow up and get on with our lives.  It wasn't that she didn't adore the "little us's", it was just exhausting, I suppose.
I never knew that each stage of life - infancy, early childhood, kid-ness, young adulthood, and onward would all be like different people that I would come to miss.  That little kid is now a young lady who is a joy to be around, but I miss all of the others as if they were separate individuals.  Especially during violet season.
So now I sit in the yard and pick by myself.  She's off earning a living.  It doesn't make me sad so much as it gives me time to reflect on how perfect those days were and wonder if I appreciated them as fully as I should have.  It truly is the everyday occurrences that we most treasure later on.

Mamas -  stop a minute and take a mental picture of this day.  Write it down, savor it and know that the day will come that you will miss the little person who is in the process of growing up.  That's all.