SUNDAY MORNING



"Let us be thankful for small mercies, for those moments of beauty and recollection, moments of aliveness, that we manage to salvage from the deluge of our days." --Roger Housden--

This weekend has been full of these moments...after I taught my Saturday class I drove to the cafe, feeling slightly less pain than the recent crushing physical realities of late. I honked my car horn jubilantly at the people who bundle on the parking lot sidewalk every weekend morning waving "Honk for Peace" signs. I took a table by the window and wrote with my hot cup of chai watching. Trees are blazing up now, an inferno outside. I managed yesterday to notice it again.

I wrote and wrote...fresh fiction, though I haven't yet sent my other completed manuscript to the agents or houses my old would-be-editor recommended. (Yes, I do plan to soon...) The flush of creating new work stained my cheeks red like the blistered elms and I felt full. M. took our children to his parents' house as I drove the back roads home--then, he went for a six-mile run over the leaf-strewn hills and I sat down at the silent kitchen table and wrote some more.

I spoke to my brother on the phone, then I bathed--washing and combing out my long hair. We went to dinner, M. sipping a chocolate beer and my first food of the day actually agreeing to not rebel against me. Musicians started playing as we stepped back out into the cold November night. The moon was just a shred away from full and had a halo of clouds wicking away from her face. We drove home with the music loud and my heart was just a shred away from breaking with fullness all its own.

We passed the evening...just us...my body aching again before bedtime with its familiar relentlessness. But, I held onto silence like the small mercy it was. I am trying to hold onto that gratitude for the inevitable struggles, surgery, and setbacks still coming. We woke to our empty house this morning and talked in that seamless spiraling way of a young couple without children, a mortgage, jobs, illness, life. Then, we sat in a diner over coffee and tea, smiling at our reflections in the mirrored walls...reveling in the final hours before we assumed our posts as parents again. I am not feeling as well as I'd hoped after a brief hiatus, but it was beautiful to have the quiet time to really enjoy at the newly-naked tree limbs, the creative work blossoming, and the man I wake up to each morning this past decade of my life. Now, I am ready for the vibrant, wild deluge of our children this afternoon...high tide again...


Why M. needed this time just as badly as I did...