This framed scrap of paper is my prized possession. It is the thing I would grab first (after the kid, the husband, and the dog) if there were a fire at our house. If you can’t tell what it says, I’ll translate- “Mom, I know how hard you have been working. I love you, Dominic.”

When COVID shut the world down, our son Dominic was in the middle of kindergarten. And when he, and we, started working out of the house via Zoom, email, and phone calls, he saw how much and how hard we worked. But in the beginning- we didn’t work on much of anything. Because at first, NOBODY was selling their home. Nobody was buying a home. Nobody was moving. So mostly, we sat at the desks in our home office and worried. He wrote this on a scrap of construction paper and left it on top of my laptop one day. April 2020. The next morning when I found it, two things struck me instantly. 1. Whether we like it or not, our children are WATCHING us. They see the things we do for them and our families. And 2. No more sitting around worrying; it’s time to get to WORK.

I got this little scrap matted and framed as soon as I could. It is my whole heart on a 5-inch piece of paper, and it now hangs in our office, where I look at it every day. It’s my favorite thing. And the kiddo who wrote it- He’s pretty great too.

What about you? What is your most prized possession? What is the first thing you would grab if you had to get out in a hurry? What is the thing that would mean nothing to anyone else but means the world to you?

Thanks for reading,
Kelly (+ Graham) Levine