Behind the Puddle

I have taken a ridiculous number of pictures of the puddle.

At the time, most of them didn’t seem particularly important.

A goose in the yard.

A bird at the feeder.

A turtle that was mostly a blurry shape in the distance.

The water after a rain.

The water before a rain.

Pinecone eating.

Pinecone climbing.

Pinecone apparently doing absolutely nothing but still somehow deserving another photograph.

There are pictures of the girls.

The dogs.

The patio.

The trees.

The sky.

And plenty of photographs where I am fairly certain I knew what I was trying to capture when I took them, although looking at them later provides very little evidence.

But when I scroll backward through those pictures, something happens.

I begin to see a season instead of individual days.

I can see how tiny the baby geese once were.

How much the mallards have grown.

How the puddle has changed with the rain and heat.

Who was visiting regularly then.

Who hadn’t appeared yet.

Things that felt ordinary while they were happening have become markers of time.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of looking back.

We can see things in reflection that are almost impossible to recognize while we’re living them.

When we are inside a season of life, we’re usually too busy living it to understand what it means.

We don’t know which ordinary afternoon will become a favorite memory.

We don’t know that someone is saying something we’ll remember years later.

We don’t recognize the last time something happens because we assume there will be another.

And we certainly don’t always realize how much we ourselves are changing.

I didn’t sit down behind the puddle at the beginning of summer and decide that I was going to become different.

I just sat down.

Then I looked.

Then I noticed something.

Then something else.

I learned names.

I became curious.

I started telling stories.

I paid attention.

And somewhere inside all those ordinary days, something shifted.

I don’t think I could tell you exactly when.

That’s the strange thing about change.

We often recognize it only when we turn around.

Reflection gives us that view.

Not so we can judge the person we were.

Not so we can rewrite what happened.

And not so we can live permanently looking backward.

Sometimes we look back simply to recognize what came with us.

A lesson.

A person.

A memory.

A little more courage.

A little more patience.

Something we survived.

Something we loved.

Something we didn’t know mattered until later.

The season isn’t over yet.

There are still stories I haven’t lived and visitors I haven’t seen.

But looking back at where it began, I can already see gifts I didn’t recognize when they arrived.

Maybe that’s why reflection matters.

Sometimes we have to travel a little farther before we can see what an ordinary moment gave us.