This morning as I was walking back from dropping my kids to daycare/school, I clutched at my bag. I could feel my wallet inside – it carried a few spare notes and some cards that were easily replaceable. But the treasure was not in the wallet. It was in a little ziploc next to it.

Neatly packed in it were six little pebbles, a lavender flower, a small twig, a round sweetgum fruit and some dried wild berries.

Every morning I now walk my kids to school and this ziploc is the repository of our explorations. We walk slowly. I push the stroller in which my 2-year-old sits and my 4-year-old either walks alongside or rides the attached stroller stand. We make stories of dinosaurs and mammoths. We stop and watch loading trucks and race with garbage trucks. We count colorful roses in people’s gardens, sing songs and rhymes, say hello to neighbors and pet eager dogs.

We thus gather. Pebbles, flowers, twigs, berries. Wonder, excitement, delight, memories. I put them all together, seal it into a little ziploc – safe in my bag, treasured in my heart.