Growing Away

There are height tick marks charting my children’s growth in fading pencil on the kitchen wall. One day they will be painted away as childhood has been by time’s brush, and it will be only a solitary, fuzzy snapshot in our memory. The lowest ones are as faint as the babyhood of my tall little boy. The pencil, the memories, and he, I can hardly keep up with as they go running away. Wouldn’t it be humble of mortal humanity to see most of life’s tick marks as a memory of heaven, written in pencil and fading, hardly stored in the eternal history books?