When Hoarding Pays Off

My Maia is a hoarder. I mean, she hasn't been diagnosed or anything, but she certainly has extreme relationships with stuff. Everything is a treasure from which she cannot part. Everything. It's ridiculous. We're working on it, but without much success.

After school one afternoon last week when I was working on Halloween costumes, I was talking to Mason and Maia about his costume.

"Okay," I said, "so Miracle Max wears this big robe, and we have a robe. He wears this like shawl, fringe thing over it and we have that. He's got that half-bald, half-wild gray hair--check. He also wears a necklace. It looks like it might be a bone of some kind. Here's what we need guys: a wooden toy of some sort that I can hot glue onto a string to make his necklace."

"A wooden toy?" Mason asked.

"Yeah. Just something kind of big and oddly shaped that I can make into a necklace for you to wear. Like a big bead or a train track piece or something that looks a little like it might be a bone."

"A bone?" piped Maia, "You just need a bone? I've got bones up in my room!"

She pronounced this as if she had just said, "All you need is sock? I've got a sock!"
Somehow, in the brain of my twelve-year-old daughter, having bones in her room is as normal as having a pillow up there.

Maia continued, "What kind of bone do you need? I've got a mouse skull or some chicken legs..."

At this point, I think my stammering had stopped and I was able to form the obvious question of where she had gotten this heretofore unknown bone collection. "Terebithia," was her response. (All the neighbors kids call the woods behind our house, "Terebithia.")

As it turned out, no glue gun was needed. I was able to thread the ribbon right through the eye socket of some small mammal's skull. And I will emphatically go on the record stating that it was no mouse skull--I'm thinking more like a baby fox. Let's just say it was more substantially sized than any rodent I've ever seen and we only had about half up the upper portion (no lower jaw).

All's well that ends well, I suppose. Mason couldn't have been happier to add a partial genuine animal skull to his Halloween costume. Maia was thrilled to be of service. And let's be honest, here, dear friend and devoted reader, you know what she was thinking inside, "See, Mom, my room isn't full of trash. I have really useful stuff in there!"

I'm still not convinced.

(P.S. In a tragic turn-of-events, Mason lost the necklace at school after the Halloween parade before I got photos of him in his costume. Ironically, Maia took it better than I!)