No More Pants

Last week I ran up to my friends Sam and A's house to check it out. I'd helped A pick colors and I wanted to see what the house looks like now that it's all painted. And it is gorgeous.

They have a sun room in the back of the house. You can see through to the back from the dining room, which they painted a delicious, strong but subtle yellow. And then A chose a beautiful purple for the back wall of that back room. When you look through from the dining room, you get a playful surprise.

The back wall actually is mostly French doors and windows. So you have this purple surrounding white door and window frames. And through the windows you see the lush green of trees, which works really nicely with the purple. It's serene and fun all at the same time. I love it.

The run was a good one - mostly uphill, which I like being forced to do. I knew they'd be outside, so me turning up all sweaty and gross wouldn't be a big deal. I arrived to find her gardening with her son Z, who is four. Well, she was gardening. He was collecting bugs.

I have to say, she's better with bugs than I'll ever be. She'd be digging with her trowel and say, "Hey Z! Look! A centipede!" And she'd pick it out of the dirt for him to put in his bug jar.

I was stretching on the porch when she whispered, "Hey, Lisa - look!"

Z, it turned out, had needed to pee. And so he'd gone around the side of the house, dropped his drawers, and was essentially drawing circles in the air with pee. It was hilarious.

Truth be told, it looked like fun. If I could do that, I totally would. In fact, if I were a guy, I am certain I'd eventually get arrested for peeing creatively in public. Seriously.

When he was finished, he pulled his undies back up, but decided he was done wearing shorts for the day. He simply said, "No more pants."

And so there he was, catching bugs and helping his mother figure out where the various plants should go. In his blue little boy underwear.

There's such a short window of time in childhood where that's OK. I'm glad A is just letting him run with it. How liberating to stroll around the yard on a warm evening in your skivvies, completely unselfconscious, totally comfortable.

I remember back to not wanting to wear clothes. My brother and I did so as little as possible. We'd get to the pool and I'd immediately strip off my bathing suit. Our photo albums have a variety of pictures with me, wearing nothing but big orange or green water wings, leaping into pools around the world.

The Director came by to get me, and I introced him to my friends. When he said hi to Z, he looked at the blue undies, smiled, and said, "No pants?"

"He was tired of them," I explained. "No more pants."

"I'm tired of mine. Do I have to keep wearing them?"

It probably goes without saying that I patiently replied that he's a responsible adult, for the most part. And so I trust him to make good decisions. Particularly regarding pants in public.

But now this is The Director's new favorite phrase. "No more pants."

A friend has been talking about getting happy hour together somewhere besides the usual places. She is thinking IndeBleu, maybe PS7. I told him about this.

"Those sound like the kinds of places you have to wear pants."