You are the trailer to my floatie

I’ve always found that sentimental tune, “You are the wind beneath my wings” unbearably mawkish and self-centered. It’s hard to fathom the arrogance of a singer who “can fly higher than the eagle” as long as “you” just do the hard work to keep that singer up in the sky. So imagine my surprise when the beloved toddler announced, “Mama, you’re the trailer to my floatie.”

True, she was sitting in a floatie and I was pushing her around a little bay in the St. Lawrence River. She is, after all, a toddler and thus a crack literalist. But she’d hit on a metaphor for parenthood far more apt than she knew. I decided to make a little list of other metaphors drawn from her world:

• You are the valve to my sippy cup.
  
• You are the satin edge to my blankie.

Alas, like all trailers, I am a disappointing sequel to her beloved originality.