Counting Whimsy

On a fall day when my daughter was a toddler she sat in my lap going down a park slide. Before pushing off the top to slide down together we alternated counting... "One" she said, "Two" I said, "FOUR!" she said in that toddler pitched voice that comes in tandem with toddler dimple hands. 

She counted in the sequence 1-2-4-9-6 for a year or more. And I never corrected her. Instead, I absorbed that good dose of whimsy and counted it fine.

Whimsy is playfulness. It's a truthfulness tied together with unreason. That feeling that comes in your heart the way a cold fresh breeze blows through your home when your windows are open. The unexpected. The unpredictable. The unrigid. The unsequenced. The unpractical. The unusual. The misspelled. The miscount. The not quite right but quite what we needed. The not a word. The not fixed or contained. It's the free, the silly, without the realization of being so. 

I added some whimsy to my home today; some eight years to that day on the slide. Where people make address plaques for their home, I made a 12496 plaque and added it to my wall. I counted it quite what my home needed; I counted it whimsy.