And then, reality.

I was glad the rain came; it poured.  Lightening flashed like teeth laughing at the sky, sending birds flap, flap, flapping.  Their brown bodies liquid.  Clouds boiled.  Tiny petals shook.  Early pears thumped the ground. 

I needed the racket.  It thatched away cobwebs, and stopped my bobbing.  It made me take charge of this ruthless month of September. The month when it’s just so easy to want summer back.  The month of drowning, surfacing, drowning, surfacing. The month when you blink, and it is 10pm.  The month when it's painfully obvious your children are one year older.  The month growing becomes tangible. 

One week later, the rain is gone, and they are now one-year-bigger-kids, and I am a one-year-older-mom.  I’ve spent a lot of the early September quiet deciphering between sadness over the start of school, or disappointment I am no longer the mom of a baby.  Either way, both are realities we have to swallow when raising kids.  I just wish they didn’t come so soon.