Marking The Passage of Time On the Linen Closet Door

Where have all the treasured baseball cards gone?

When was the last time there was a sheet doubling as the walls of a secret clubhouse slung across a framework fashioned from building blocks?

When did our medicine cabinet supply revert back to flesh colored band aids instead of cutesy characters?

Time marches on. With happy tears, they grow up fast.

And yet, a record remains. Memories written on the pages of my mind, captured in photographs and videos....and then.....there's the inside door of my linen closet.......

We moved into our current apartment just shy of twenty years ago. Joey was attempting his first tentative steps and Jennifer was still an angelic soul waiting to join our fold. Michael and Erica were walking hand in hand wearing matching black and white saddle shoes.

It was that very first year, on the first of January, that I began marking time on the inside of my linen closet door. The children lined up in stocking feet as I painstakingly measured each one and drew a pencil line with their name and the date beside it. Every New Years Day thereafter, until such time when I grudgingly had to admit that a particular child had indeed reached adulthood, I drew those lines - sometimes with little footnotes for posterity. As the children grew, we allowed them to measure US, so there was a record of each one as they inevitably climbed higher than their parents.
Every so often I would find a childish scrawl in crayon on the inside of that door where a child particularly proud of his progress that year would leave an autograph.
When guests have attained "like family" status, we measured them one time as well.
I've always said that if we move out of our current apartment that door comes with me; where I would put it or what I would do with it, I have not yet figured out.
We were discussing over Shabbos how it is time to add Kayla to the door.
This New Years we will iy"H begin to mark the growth of a THIRD GENERATION. Time cycles on... I can't wait to stock princess band-aids in my medicine cabinet again.....