There’s a feature in WordPress where you can type something and then save it as a “draft”….to be pulled up and finished later when you understand more about what you were thinking at the time.

I really don’t usually know what I’m thinking in the moment I’m thinking it….much less what I was thinking two months ago when I typed “rainbow box” and then didn’t know what to do with it.

So….I guess that what I’m saying is that I really don’t know what that means.

I think that Jenny got a box of thread that was multi-colored….and I thought that “rainbow box” was kind of funny…or beautiful….or poetic…or something.

It might have been about thread…or crayons or something….

There must have been a reason that I hit “save draft”.

(Ah….I remember now! It was a new box of cloth diapers… multi-hued and beautiful….a fantastic box of colors.)

You don’t hold a real rainbow in a box…and the box was never the important part, anyway….

You can’t even take a picture that shows what a real rainbow means and put it in a box for later.

You can’t do that.

When the good stuff is gone…it’s really gone….except for the memory of what we think that we saw.

Nate woke up at 3:00 this morning after having a bad dream.

I woke up when Jenny asked him if he was OK…. silhouetted in the door frame.

“I had a bad dream.”

She started to get up and then realized that Sparrow was more awake than she thought she was….so then I was encouraged to get up and take Nate back to bed.

(We have a chance of sleeping if Nate doesn’t sleep with us. If we can head him off at the pass and go back to his room with him before he has a chance to crawl up into our bed, the evening rolls more smoothly.)

I realized this morning that you really shouldn’t try to analyze a 4-year-old’s bad dream situation at 3 in the morning.

This morning, I was too comatose to try that.

The best that I could do was stumble and direct while we made our way back to his bed….where, miraculously, he quickly fell back asleep.

If I had been even a little more lucid, I might have said something stupid like “what was your bad dream about?! What were you thinking… dreaming like that? What happened in your head that you woke up scared?”

I don’t ask crazy questions like that….but I have been known to open a can of worms before….and I realized this morning that it’s not something I should ever do.

Nobody wants to think about the things that scared them.

A four-year-old doesn’t want to think about scary things once….when they were dreaming….and they sure don’t want to talk about them when they’re awake and can really give it some deep fostered introspection.

So I took Nate back to his bed, he fell asleep easily while I was there with him, and then I decided to just stay up when I crept out of his room and quietly closed his door.

And….here I am…awake and moving my fingers on plastic keys.

I don’t know still what “rainbow box” means….I guess that I just liked the way it sounded.

Some of this stuff you just have to take at face value.

All the good stuff and all the bad stuff….we carry it somewhere inside of us.

Maybe that’s what the rainbow box is for?