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…
