{remember this}

He didn't say a word as I left his side and returned with my camera. Just kept his pencil to paper even as I shifted the Canon down close to the thin blue lines and third grade spelling words.

I want to remember this. 

That's all I'm thinking as I snapped, over and over: I want to remember what his little 8 year old fingers look like. Spread across crumpled loose-leaf. Closed tightly around a yellow no. 2. Those fingers that are so much like his Daddy's: wide and strong and almost always with a thin line of dirt beneath the nails. Those fingers that once curled tightly around mine as he nursed himself to sleep as an infant. Those fingers that clutched desperately to mine as I walked out of his preschool classroom for the first time. Those fingers that are now sure and steady around a baseball bat, and like to swirl themselves through thick hair in that messy style he likes.

I don't want to ever forget the inexplicable joy I get from watching those short, sturdy little fingers.