My kids are waltzing, or what passes for waltzing in their pre-adolescent, high-school-musical-filled brains, in the living room. They’re singing as they twirl, and as they pass the doorway they both make a huge grin in my direction and then stop and come in to see what I’m doing. AAH! they exclaim, when they see that I’m writing about them (they’re sitting here giggling right now).
Their cheeks are bright pink, and their skin is cold: they were out in the chilly evening air watering the garden …and each other… a few minutes ago. I kept thinking it would rain, but it’s held off all day with the sort of gray-white overcast ready-to-rain feeling that gets me down.
Karin thinks it’s embarrassing that I’m writing about them dancing, but they gave me such a little jolt of joy in a long hard weekend, when I needed all the smiles I could get. Karin is actually CRYING now. Begging me to stop and quit writing about them. She’s collapsed on the desk and is sobbing her little drama-queen heart out. Martin, of course, is laughing his head off.
They’re turning into summer children: legs and arms and skin and golden highlights in their hair. I expect we’ll see less and less of them as the days lengthen to peak and they’re outside on the trampoline or over at a friends’ house, although we’ll probably have to kick them off the computers first.
Martin and I went out for a walk this afternoon, but we went backwards on our usual round. We didn’t actually walk backwards, Martin wants to make clear. We just went around the other way. It made me notice things that we don’t usually see. A few days ago he took the treasure hunt notepad with him and wrote down all the different kinds of flowers we saw. When we got home he totaled it up and there were 49 on the list. There were only about 6 that we didn’t know the names of, mostly flowering ground covers with variously colored blossoms and a couple of different flowering shrubs. The early spring flowers are pretty much gone now, wilting and blown. Next up: lupines and poppies and roses and peonies.
After reading a note from my friend Carol’s brother where he asked her friends to send stories and memories of Carol to him so that he could put them together for her 7-year-old daughter who had expressed her fear to her father that she would forget her mom, I spent the day gathering photos of her from various AWC events and our last couple of Thanksgiving dinners. It made me glad that I have been journaling online for so many years now and that I have all my content printed into book format. All those scrapbooks and photo albums and journals aren’t for me, are they? They’re for my kids and their someday children, even if I live to be 100.
A Big Bright Bouquet of Belated Birthday Wishes to redpirk!