A Pop and Rylee Story

Darling little Rylee is a three-year-old, fairy-like child. Her mom and dad call her “Monkey,” but to her Pop and Gramma, she’s a fairy!  Blonde, blue-eyed, and slightly built, she flits about the house without a care in the world, leaving an obstacle course of toys and toddler debris wherever her tiny feet carry her. And she calls ChapStick “ChapKiss.”  Isn’t that just the cutest thing you’ve heard all day?  ChapKiss… adorable, just simply adorable…

One late evening while visiting our little Rylee-roo in the very arid state of Nevada, we decided to go shopping at a local retail store.  Pop held the fairy-like child while my daughter and I compassed the store for needed things and any other not-so-needed things that caught the attention of our roving eyes.   Separated from his girls, Pop was in another part of the store, diligently searching for lip balm—an absolute necessity when you leave the humid island called “Long” and enter Nevada’s moisture-free atmosphere.  His lips were parched and quickly nearing the stage of cracked and bleeding.  He looked in the health and beauty section and he looked on the end racks at the registers—he looked EVERYWHERE but could not find the famous lip balm he needed oh-so-badly.  

Desperate, he gave in—he asked an employee—which, for a guy, is only half as bad as asking for directions.  With Rylee-roo carefully perched in his arms, the words tumbled out of his mouth—instantly regrettable and completely irretrievable, “Can you please tell me where I can find the ChapKiss?” The fairy-like child was the only one who made the connection between ChapStick and ChapKiss while the store employee stared blankly at her Pop’s face; and they both stared back, waiting for an answer.  He must’ve noticed the near cracked and bleeding stage of my husband’s lips. “Oh, you mean the ChapStick!” Sympathetic and amused at the same time, he pointed him back to the Health and Beauty section of the store, where simple things like ChapKiss get lost among the colorful and abundant bottles of lotions, potions, and shampoo.  Finding what he wanted, he purchased a pack of three.  Back in the car, he rewarded each one of us with our very own stick of moisturizing lip balm while we listened to his ChapKiss ChapStick story.  “Don’t tell anyone,” he made us promise.  “Oh, we won’t!” we laughed.  But I had my fingers crossed inside my winter mittens…