my soul got happy and stayed all day

here's a little something that is truly delightful, "some magic that will heal my ailing soul." my darling dearling tucked it under his arm and bought it on wednesday night so that i could carefully turn pages and slip paper from envelopes and go birding sans binoculars both yesterday and today and tomorrow for sure.

strange, but true, i have two boys who can eat an entire box of macaroni and cheese (and tell me they're finished, by hand or mouth, one way or another) between themselves. they don't do it every time i whip such a sorry, cheezy, lunch together, mind you. and not without a healthy sprinkle of frozen peas mixed in, of course. but they have eaten the cooked contents of a box themselves only this past week! i'm astonished. one would think they should both be reading and toilet capable in order to participate in a macaroni eating fest. one would think so and one (myself, their mother!) would be wrong.







cold and windy. the doors and windows barred shut. the green is oustanding from treetop to grass bottom. the mud here in illinois is black and then blacker, nothing like the slippery red clay sludge of south carolina. something overwhelming about something so dark and black and quiet.

coffee flows from the shining black pot on the counter. gray days call for tea or coffee and sometimes both. my nose is cold and i'm wearing socks again. it's a welcome sort of cold, though. it's a spring cold, the kind you choose to let in the house through screen and iron or to send in a swirl and a howl around the bricks and glass and prematurely blooming lilacs.

jude is feverish and cries out in the night. i hear him and am cut to the quick. i am tired and bleary and sometimes cry or grump to myself. i can hardly abide a baby crying, a new baby in particular. someone told me recently that she awoke in the night and heard through the open windows a baby somewhere in the neighborhood screaming and wailing and crying. i thought about my jude crying as i bounced and nursed and walked and swayed. i wondered if anyone was awakened in the neighborhood by his crying.

"it cut through me like a knife...i was really, really uncomfortable. maybe it was a baby crying it out? i don't know... i mean, it was eery," she said.

and i know what she means, that uncomfortable feeling. the feeling that you need to get up and slip on some shoes and go to find out what is going on with that baby.

i, for one, do not like to sleep alone. i like having someone (and, most often, three someones) warm nearby, someone snoring, someone stealing covers, someone talking nonsense in his sleep. ernie says that we were not designed to sleep alone and i readily agree. it's interesting that adults, who are, for the most part cognitively responsible and emotionally functional, sleep in a tangle one with another, night after night, until old age and its bodily curiosities move them to do otherwise. but in turn, these same adults expect babies, who are fresh from womb and heartbeat, a cozy place as near to mama as near can be, to sleep alone in their own beds and rooms, "so that they will learn" that they are "not the center of the universe" and other malarkey. it's more than interesting, it's lamentable.

enough! it's friday night, earth night it is, and the birds are sleeping safely and soundly. something must be done to ring in the weekend.