{Preview} In our bones

A new baby drapes your home in gauze.  Wooden walls turn into a sheer, breathing tent - a cover that eases light, quiets aches, and softens the world outside.  Everything else pushes to a far away place.  Muffled.  The smallness of your bed becomes all the space you need.   Long moments pile and loop, as you watch this small person who was just growing beneath your skin.  You try on the feeling of mother.  Caregiver.  Sheppard.  Lover of someone new.  You reconnect with someone your body and spirit seems to already know.  He was meant for you.

Blindly, I run back to these early hours as my children grow.  Some days at a dizzying pace.  I come up for air, gasping for the moments when breathing, feeding, sleeping was all that mattered.  These memories fuel for the ruts, when things hurt, I am unsure, or maybe have lost my way.  Growing-up a child isn't easy.  And like weeds, they grow.  Racing towards the sun.  No matter how much you squeeze or beg or clamp shut your eyes.  They grow.

Many a wild moment will bleed and run and color the slate of their childhood.  The jungle of life pushes that early-gauze-newborn tent off way before we are ready.  Life's long arms creep in.  But we never forget.  Those first hours.  The haze.  The quiet.  The connection.  The billowing, blinding light of a new soul.

It's rooted deep in our bones.

{Preview} Love prefers unmade beds

Love prefers unmade beds.  It creeps in when mealtime’s on the floor, and becomes louder when dogs and strings and Tupperware lids become toys.  Love’s song is full when feet are bare, and there is much banging on light-filled windows.  Love was parading about on this day, shaking the house with its clamor, spilling a wild, wide silken river onto the floor.  As my children grow, these are the moments I want to burn into my brain and ride into forever –- flashes of milked skin, a careless swoop of ponytail, exhaustion, dishtowels, crumbs on the floor, sun streaming in the windows – and babies - swarming at my feet.

Dusk

And sometimes you just get lucky because the kids are fighting and can’t play alone, and you happen to have made a pot of soup for dinner at 8am.  So it was last night.  Henry needed a push, and he tugged me out into the milky light.  Sparrows ducked in and out of nests.  Wet grass stuck to feet black from running.  Fallen leaves.  I pushed small backs higher and higher, slender stacks of bones against my palms.  And breathed in fallen pears, half eaten by squirrels, fermenting the sweet air, while small legs pump, pump, pumped.  I have to remember it is nice to be there when dusk falls.

{Preview} Portrait of a school-aged kid

In those first moments of summer, kids molt like snakes.  Piles of who they were yesterday ribbon like silk into the fragrant, cut grass.

It doesn’t matter how old you get, you will always remember those first days of summer.  Like the last walk home from the bus, marled pavement and small pebbles rolling beneath your feet.  The shock-of-white-sun from looking over your shoulder, making sure your mom was still there.  The sky.  Extra big.  Extra blue.  Some odd sense you are moving up in the world, even if it’s only from first grade to second.  Your heart high and full in your little chest like a balloon. 

Any fears or worries, or joys for that matter, from the year have fled.  What’s left is the core of a school-aged kid.  Ripe confidence.  Dirty hands.  Curiosity, glistening.  And the amazing feeling you have, and can always, conquer the world.