Friday, March 12, 2004

The Slow Rebirth

Snow today in fat light lamb-white flakes that spun sideways in the faintest wind. Looking out the window causes a slight dizziness, like watching too-fast clouds on a green hill in summer. It's a bit like being inside a spun snow globe.

It's been an under construction Spring, more gradual than I can remember. The weather goes from fifty to twenty and back again overnight; the bare bud-impending trees along the meadow ridge strip, dress ghostlike in snow, and strip again by nightfall like a bevy of little girls in a dress-up house. I stay up late but not until three; I sleep late, but not after eleven. Instead of awaking to silence, as in years past, I rise to a treasure hunt each day, to find the morning's new daughter at play.

Out of practice after six years of dining hall provisioning we shop almost every day, and struggle to develop the dishwashing habit. We ponder outings but, other than the trip down to the Mt. Holyoke Carousel and adjacent children's museum last weekend, back when grading still weighed heavy on the brain, we mostly stay in and around, watching the world alternate from snow to sun and back again. We plan for Boston tomorrow through Tuesday, but playfully, knowing that overplanning makes it work, preferring play and spur of the moment-ness, a lack of direction.

Not sure if the way we shuttered ourselves into the rush week of finals to weather the miscarriage has affected the subjective nature of time, if the egoshift from waiting to waiting-no-more has been a c-change, however temporary, provoking a new substance, a different foundation for this year's zen-like vacation state. It might just be Willow's personhood rearing itself, making this, for the first true time, a vacation of three of us, not just two and "the baby." Behind me as I write I can hear her in the bed as she fades towards her nap, singing made-up songs about her new Wiggles balloon, now calling for daddy to change her diaper. Be right back.

posted by boyhowdy | 12:25 PM |

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