The Window Washers

Today on the way home from dropping the boys off at school, Tater Tot and I spotted some window washers dangling off the side of one of the high-rise towers downtown. They were scrubbing away, supported only by a thin rope attached to a harness, about a hundred feet above the busy street we were on.

We watched them for a minute and I wondered out loud if they ever felt scared up there. Tater Tot actually snorted. "Mom, of course not! They're grown-ups!"

I looked down at her little preschooler self. "Tater, grown-ups get scared sometimes too, ya know."

She looked at me with that long-suffering expression she gets when she thinks I'm being dense. "Mom, grown-ups aren't afraid of the foot, Coraline, creepy piano music, or the emperor. Soooo, if they aren't afraid of those things, then they aren't afraid of anything."

Just to bring you up to speed, the foot would be from the fake scary movie from Diary of a Wimpy Kid:Rodrick Rules. Coraline would be a truly creepy movie that even I, a card carrying grown-up, thinks is scary. And last but not least, Emperor Palpatine, from Star Wars.

I love that she believes that the only truly scary things in this world are pretend and easily tucked away in a box or put away with the piano. Because being a grown-up is scary. And, in too short a time, she'll come to understand that herself.

But in the meantime, there's something comforting in knowing that she feels she has nothing bigger to fear than a cartoon character, her brother playing creepy music on the piano, and a fake foot.