TOOTH MARKS ON THE WINDOWSILL

As your children grow up they leave marks on your house and on your heart. I will never forget my grandmother remodeling her house in the late 1970's. Her instructions to the carpenter was, "Make it look modern!" The furniture was always in style in her house but the texturing of the walls was the kind that had big bumps with points and curves. You almost have to remember this texturing to understand but it looked a lot like whipped cream mounds with tips or a pie topping with points. At any rate, these tips stuck out at times as far as an inch or more and to get them off they had to be scraped and sanded.
The window ledge in the front living room was very low (about 14 inches) and had a regular windowsill at the bottom. The carpenter came in with an electric saw to take it off. At this my grandmother screamed, "What in the world do you think you are going to do with that?" He explained that the window ledge was out of style and besides would take a great deal of sanding if they left in as it had deep marks embedded on both ends. To this she replied, "Those are my granddaughter's tooth marks, you can paint them but you can NOT remove them. That was the only thing she was tall enough to cut her little teeth on." (I was a real shorty as a baby!)
The interesting thing about this occurrence is that I was fully grown and had two children of my own, one of which was older than I was when the marks first appeared. I think the important thing about it is the meaning that those marks had for her. They were a part of something that had touched her life that could not be replaced, for they were part of a precious memory.
As I look now at my darling grandchildren and the things they do, I understand what those marks on the windowsill meant to my grandmother. We all have them, sometimes they are in our hearts and sometimes they actually show, to be shared either way. Hold on tight to the marks your loved ones make on your lives, they cannot be replaced.