Martin and I were leaving the house to go for a walk this afternoon, after I got home early from work. We stepped outside the door, and as I was locking it, with my back to the backyard, I said to him, “Martin, go close the playhouse door.”
His eyes got all huge and he said, “How did you know the playhouse door was open?? You’re not even looking at it!!” as he started running away behind me, toward the playhouse (aaah, the never-ending pleasure of instant obedience).
“I’m a mom! I have eyes in the back of my head!” I yelled. He zoomed around the corner of the garage, out of my sight-line (if I’d been looking in his direction, which I wasn’t), and called, “Oh yeah? What am I doing now then??”
“Making a stupid face at me!” I shouted. I heard him gasp. “OH MY GOD, how did you DO that?!”
He shut the playhouse door and came back to me, where I was doubled over laughing. “I’m totally blogging this,” I told him. It’s so easy to mess with their minds. Also, I had noticed the open playhouse door when I got home, to begin with.
I love autumn. I love the seasons of change: spring and fall. But lately I don’t feel up to writing out my love in words that have any weight or meaning to them. Bethany is doing it, instead. So is Christina. It seems as though I’m in prosaic real-life mode right now. Tupperware parties and board meetings and web work and laundry loads and the prospect of 2 weeks of being the only parent home to deal with meals, homework, activity driving, bedtime routines and up-and-at-em’s. Hell, next thing you know I’ll be wearing Mom Jeans. Oh. Wait.
What I need is some time in the sun, a slower walk outdoors with time to notice, to jot things down in my mental moleskine. To pick the moments and hold them in my hands and twist and turn them, this way and that, viewing every angle, and seeing how the light plays off them, reflects, absorbs. To SEE my surroundings instead of whirling through them, and take a moment to figure out how to describe them in such a way that they live again on the screen of someone else’s imagination as well as the memory of mine.
Really Great Writing Out There Right Now: Lemon Pie! (and memories)
How Life Should be Lived: The Fun Theory