Some Pig

If you hear someone sniffling and sobbing from the middle of the movie theater, that’s me.

I sat with Wyatt on one side of me, clutching his hand so hard I’m sure he was thinking “geez mom, you’re cutting off my circulation,” and Katie on the other, sugared up on the bag of Hershey’s Kissables that I’d smuggled in for her.

I wiped my tears away as they poured down my cheek with a salty, thin, paper napkin leftover from the popcorn bucket.

I knew it was coming, as I had heard this story a thousand times, and yet I sat there paralyzed with the grief akin to losing my beloved childhood cat.

It hit me like a ton of bricks, Charlotte looks sleepily at Wilbur and explains to him that she is “languishing”, feeling her age, getting old.

Oh, the horror.

The tears, they roll freely as if competing with each other to see who can make it to the bottom of my chin first.

Charlotte’s Web has got to be one of my favorite childhood stories, one I never forgot and retold to my children with more enthusiasm than I thought I had in me. I had anticipated taking the kids to the new movie version of the beloved E.B White book for months, since I had first seen trailers for it during the summer. Wyatt’s class read it in 1st grade last year and we’d seen the cartoon version a hundred times. But no matter how many times I’d heard the story told, it’s beautiful telling of life, death, friendship and loyalty find me breathless.

Like Charlotte, I hope my children, my magnum opus, will be able to go wherever and do whatever they want, as if drifting on tiny webs that will always bind them to me, forever.