The last thing on my self-imposed list of things to get done this weekend is design and print Martin’s birthday party invitations, and I’m rapidly running out of time, so this might be a short post. I feel like running up and down the steps of a museum in Philadelphia with my clenched fists raised in victory over my head.
Excuse me for a moment while I digress in disgust: I just went to google a photo of Rocky to link to in that sentence and found an article about tourists at the Philadelpha Museum of Art that said this:
Bill Moore, chief executive of the Independence Visitor Center, said many visitors want a “Rocky pose” photo. “We try to encourage people to actually go inside the Art Museum, too,” Moore said. “But a lot of people just want to run up the steps.”
Isn’t that sad? GO INTO THE MUSEUM, people! Sheesh.
/end digression
We had the first snow of the season on Friday. It started out slow and then started to grow. By the time we got home it was adhering to the slick surfaces of the streets, coating the ground and swirling about under the streetlights in a madly whirling dance. We awoke the next morning to sunshine sparkling off the white-blanketed yard, a perfect circle of green grass enclosed beneath the trampoline. Everywhere south of us, the snow melted off quickly, but here in our little freezy pocket dale, it stuck fast and we’re still encased in a fairy-sparkle world of ice and lacy sun-eaten snow. I find myself singing White Christmas over and over, out loud and in my head, a lullaby each night before I close my eyes.
I did laundry on Friday, too. I stood in the warmth of the laundry room, patiently bending and pulling clothing piece by piece from the hot cavern of the dryer, snapping out the shirts, folding each garment according to my perfected-over-time-laundry-folding-methods. Bending to retrieve socks which seem to go out of their way to fling themselves to the floor as if they were trying to avoid being paired. I held up a pair of Martin’s pants and was suddenly horrorstruck by how big they were. Such long legs! When did his legs get so long? It’s easy to miss the growing when you see your children each day. They go by in a blur, the tops of their heads shimmering, hands waving, eyes shining. But it was just yesterday that he was a baby, a toddler, a giggling sun-browned child. He’s turning 8 in 10 days. The long legs keep growing and going. All too soon, I thought—folding the pants and pressing them against my chest, hugging the warmth in, sniffing the freshly-laundered smell of them—they’ll be growing and going away from me. I was sad for a moment at how fast time goes. Then I stepped back and admired my neatly folded, neatly stacked piles of laundry and shut the dryer door.
The weekend has zoomed past in a whirlwind of choir concerts, cookie baking, cleaning, final preparations, numerous runs to the grocery store, the doorbell ringing and ringing and ringing and the raucous greetings of our friends, the sudden quiet around the dinner table as everyone took their first bite of turkey or stuffing or potatoes and sighed in contentment, the laughter and conversations that flowed like a braided ribbon from room to room, from person to person, throughout the house, all evening.
Ek Family Annual Thanksgiving Bash 2005: We were too spread out and being too goofy to manage a photo with everyone in it but you get the idea.
Belated Happy Birthday Wishes to wruf!