Category Archives: General

Taking Care

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And now for a PSA:

I was raised by a nurse. My husband is a nurse. Several of my dear friends are nurses. Many of you are slogging through nursing school right now. When I gave birth, there were two people with us: our midwife and a nurse named Felicia who I still would stop in the street and hug (much to her horror, I’m sure) were I to see her again. In today’s medical system, nurses are becoming increasingly responsible for our care, and they have one of the most prolific, strange, and often gross jobs on the face of the earth. It’s true. I’m fascinated by it, but after hearing about even one of Drew’s work days in the world of Critical Care, all I’m left with is a sense of gratitude that there are people that are willing to do what he and many, many others do every day because…geeeehhhhh, you know?

At the dinner table when we talk about Asher growing up, he will boldly announce that he’s going to “work in the hospital with Popi and make the patients feel better”. My heart swells. I’ve said this a lot over the years, but Drew has insane days at work where he helps people die, grieve, stay alive, poop, eat, breathe…and then he comes home and says, ‘it was pretty busy today’. And that’s that. That completely blows my mind, but it’s his superpower. He’s at peace with everything the body is capable of, and because of that, he can give incredible care.

Over the course of his career, there have only been a few times when he’s brought work home, and it’s never because of what the body did, it’s because of the relationships that he witnesses as people are dying in the hospital. Most recently it was a wife saying goodbye to her husband, looking at Drew and saying simply, “he’s my best friend”. They were in their 70s. It shook Drew, not because the man died, but because he knew the grief that lay waiting for his wife. Drew does a lot of amazing life-saving blow-your-mind kind of stuff at work, but I think that so much of what nurses do is to be the one to hold a hand, accept a hug, and calmly bear witness to the unbearable truths of our humanness.

In this country, we’re quick to get misty eyed about our various heroes (as we should) but during the month of May, National Nurses Month, I hope that everyone will take a minute to find a nurse to thank for their service to your community. While they may not be running into a burning building or arresting the bad guys, they are doing the unthinkable minutia that it takes to keep our sometimes very disgusting human bodies up and running. They’re the ones that sit with wives and watch a husband take the last breath that ends a 58 year marriage. They’re the ones breaking up fist fights among grieving family members (I’m’ not joking about that one), holding down hallucinating patients that are trying to find their shoes to ‘jump over the fence over there’ in the hospital room, administering chest compressions until they can’t feel their arms, giving your baby her first gentle bath; nurses do all of the medical things that we think of nurses doing, and then the work starts.

I’m supremely proud of Drew and all of the nurses that we know. I’m proud of them for giving up weekends, nights, holidays with their families to take care of the rest of us. But more than that, I’m thankful. We all are.

So that’s that. End of PSA. Go hug a nurse.

Asher’s Birthday Present

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First I’ll let him tell you about it:

And then I’ll show you this:

photo (5)

And finally, I’ll say this:

To borrow from Paul McCartney (and for the record, one of my least favorite Beatles songs) it’s been a long and winding road to make the leap from a family of three to a family of four. On the one hand, I anticipated this happening much, much sooner and on the other, it’s overwhelming (but exciting!) to be thinking about a new person in our lives. In the way that these things go, we are getting exactly what we’ve dreamed about, but we also have no idea what that dream means. I remember feeling this way when I was pregnant with Asher, knowing that we were realizing a shared hope, but also having the sense that I was searching in the dark for a flashlight every time that I tried to imagine our new life ahead. That seems to be the way with pregnancy, we wait and wait, and then there’s a first breath, and suddenly the flashlight is in your hand and all of the answers are found in the beam of that new-life light.

I remember my sweet friend Katie visiting us when Asher was younger and as I was giving him a bath and she asked me how I learned how to bathe him. I didn’t have an answer, because as it turns out, we stitch together a heavy blanket of knowledge about our children, embellishing with shared stories, research, observation, what our children teach us about their needs, and intuition. Before having one child I had no idea if I knew how to give a baby a bath. Now I will have two, and all I can do is wait patiently to discover what else it is that I have to learn, and then laugh at myself one day when I realize that I’m doing exactly the thing I never knew I could. My clever cousin told me over Easter weekend that he’s removed the phrase, “I can’t imagine” from his speech because we can always imagine…perhaps not accurately or with great clarity, but we can always tap into that possibility, and we undermine ourselves when we assume that we can’t. I would have loved this conversation any time, but I don’t think that he could have known that he was giving my pregnant brain a little life boat by reminding me that all this daydreaming that I’m doing is just another joy of being human.

So in September, on or around September 23rd to be exact, another little light will click on in our lives and we will start down the path of siblings and nighttime feedings and deep breaths of that newborn aphrodisiac, and just like that, three will become four. Here’s to you little one, to your days ahead on the inside as you prepare for the world out here, and to the great imaginings of this life. May your journey continue to be a safe and peaceful one.

And yes, I promise that I will keep feeding you watermelon.

February

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Every year I think that I want to break up with February a little more. I feel bad being so hard on a month, but of the whole year, this is the one month that I could just skip, and with good reason. It’s the dregs of winter, the no-(wo)man’s land before the promise of spring, because even if March is in like a lion, we all know how it goes out…with buds on trees and greening grass. The little lambs of spring. I don’t have any particularly hard feelings about Valentine’s, I generally like love and chocolate and we had fun sharing it all with Asher, so my distaste for this month has everything to do with my impatience. I’m impatient to leave the door open and step outside without clinching up my body, I’m impatient to gain back our outdoor living space and lifestyle, I’m impatient to see green again, I’m impatient for the car to not need to warm up, I’m impatient for bare skin and sunhats and the charming work of warm weather.

Looked at another way, February is part of the unspoken series of lessons on patience that Life seems to be certain that I need to continue to explore. I am someone that catches a whiff of a cusp and instantly I’m pushing through to the other side. I don’t enjoy being in between, and though I regularly think about the important role of ambiguity, the truth is, I don’t feel all that comfortable with it. And no month is more ambiguous than February.

In spite of this, we’re of course having a fine time and here we are at the end of the month, just two days away from March, and I am again getting excited for the month ahead, and the months that will follow. At the end of March there will be a wedding and I will be gaining one of the sassiest girls on this good (almost) green earth as a cousin-sister. Tender sprigs are poking through the frozen ground, early morning fires still fill our kitchen with a warm charm, I’ve been making biscuits, and Asher suddenly has a keen interest in dragging me to the couch for a quick snuggle from time to time. I feel much like the Virginia landscape right now…a bit dormant, but the rumblings of the new life of a change of seasons is rattling around in my core and because I can sniff the change on the horizon, I’m itching to get to it.

That’s not really such a bad feeling after all.

Maybe I don’t want to break up with you, February. Maybe I just want to see other months. You know, have some space. It’s probably not you, it’s me.

Shimmer

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On Thursday night last week, Asher’s teacher called to let me know that his name had been drawn the previous week and that it was his turn to bring home the class pet for the weekend. While I’m not terribly keen on any animal that requires a cage (being that it’s notoriously gross to clean out animal cages) I am intent on being participatory in Asher’s school stuff and thus gave a cheery response that we were looking forward to it. I didn’t realize that they even had a class pet (it’s a big room with various aquariums. Aquariums, I have learned, are integral to the preschool experience.) and asked his teacher, “what kind of pet is it?” and she responded that it was a frog named Shimmer and that Shimmer would be coming to us with a book so that we could record her adventures while she was with us. With devious images of a frog cage filled with booze and barbies in bikinis flashing through my mind, I said that we would dutifully show Shimmer a good time and record her ‘adventures’ for the weekend and then we hung up.

On Friday I reminded Asher that we were bringing Shimmer home and sure enough that afternoon there was a small but heavy black backpack hanging on his hook. I was informed that Shimmer was in the bag.

Here, dear readers, is where I made my first mistake. I did not open the backpack to examine Shimmer and I did not inquire as to what Shimmer would be eating, her zodiac sign, her favorite Beatle, or any other useful piece of biographical information. We are raising a child with moderate success, I assumed that we could wing taking care of a frog for the weekend. Plus I had already been told that there was a book in there and I figured that if the frog had a gluten sensitivity or an aversion to broad spectrum light it would be mentioned. It’s fair to say that I assumed much in this situation.

So we’re driving home and I briefly thought about the frog and wondered if it would be expensive to find its identical twin should anything unexpected occur, and then I got hot and tossed my jacket on the passenger seat (covering the backpack) and then I forgot about the frog.

Drew was working on Friday and I had plans to meet some ladies to see Silver Linings Playbook (really enjoyed it) so I was dropping Asher off with my parents where Drew would retrieve him on the way home from work. It’s been a balmy 20 degrees here for about a week and it had snowed a little earlier in the day, but the roads were fine, so after a kiss on Asher’s cheek I headed back out the door, excited to be going to a grown up movie with other grown ups who like grown up things.

I was cruising along happily until I got to the main road and looked over to see the black backpack still in the car with me. Shimmer. Given that it was only in the twenties and that Shimmer was likely used to the tropics, I knew that three hours in the freezing cold would not end well for the old girl. I dutifully turned around and drove back to my mother’s house to deposit the frog in the warm non-frog-killing climate that they enjoy and let my friends know that I was now running behind because of the turn-around. Once at my parent’s house, I got concerned that the frog might have already gone on to the great Frog Spirit In The Sky in the hour that she had spent in the freezing car, and thought that we better face the truth now in case I was going to need to call the teacher and run a recon mission to a pet store that night. Shock doesn’t really describe what I felt when we opened the backpack at my parent’s house and discovered that indeed the frog was not alive.

Ya’ll, meet Shimmer:

afterglow (1)

I share this story with all of you as a cautionary tale to prevent any epic parent-teacher miscommunications coming your way. In hindsight it seems very obvious that a three year old would not be sent home with a living creature, though I distinctly remember strapping my parents with a smelly fat hamster a time or two when I was of a class pet age. And to be fair, at no point did I ask about care instructions, mating habits, or anything else that might have led to the teacher telling me that Shimmer was a stuffed animal but…doesn’t that seem like something that would be put on the table from the get go? Would you be willing to take the class pet WHO IS A GIGANTIC STUFFED FROG WEARING A TUTU home for the weekend? Maybe just some friendly air quotes when the word “pet” was mentioned?

We all had a good laugh about it and I’ll be the first to say that I was thrilled with the way things worked out. Asher made quite a splash with his gigantic tie dyed frog at lunch on Saturday and all in all, the class pet is welcome at our house any time. Especially now that I know I can leave it in the car. Which I would never, ever do.

The end.

Back to It

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I’ve let this slip again, haven’t I? Well let’s see if we can back to it with a promise and a confession (two of my many favorite things). The promise is more to me than anyone that might be reading (Bueller?…Bueller?…) but I promise to post at least twice a week between now and March. That seems reasonable and it’s a good exercise for me. So there’s that.

Second, the confession. 2012 became a hard year to rattle on about round about June of last year. In some ways it was just because life got so dense, and pardon the tree-laden pun (for those of you that have been following along) but I couldn’t see the forest through the trees. Or is it for the trees? Well, the point being, our cup did runneth over, mostly with heart-filling stuff, but with some heart-tugging stuff too. And because confessions are supposed to be honest, I’m going to come on out and say it. 2012 kind of kicked the shit out of me. If there is a delicate way to have such a thing done, then I’ve been on the business end of a delicate butt kicking. It was good for me. Sometimes it hurt.

So here we are, 2013, right back to it. My backside is recovering, my ego is humbled, our home fires are burning, and in the scope of the first world universe, even a tough year was undeniably a good one. As with most people, we’re setting our sights on patterning for a good year ahead, but unlike many years in the past, Drew and I both seem to be at a crossroads where the work that we want to put in this year isn’t dedicated to a trimmer waistline or a more frequently cleaned bathroom (though, let’s do those things too), but really we’re focusing on life in terms of decades. One turns 30, one starts thinking about What Comes Next. The word that I would like to give to 2013 is pivotal.

In the dreamy summer that I spent in Madison, Wisconsin nearly ten years ago, my dear friend Nelle and I would steal away with a canoe and paddle through the locks between the two lakes that hug Madison. We would paddle into one, sink down with the water, have the lock open up and glide through safely to the other side. Something big was happening around us, we were dwarfed by larger boats with big engines, but even in the narrow little canoe, we were able to stick our paddles in the water and row to what felt like the other side of the rainbow. It was thrilling and a simple enough mechanism, but one that was ultimately transformative. This year feels like that adventure. perhaps 2012 was the distance that I needed to travel between my twenties and thirties, a slow and discreet move between the prolonged adolescence that America is so fond of and my arrival into womanhood. It seems though that right now, on this day, and this point, I’m sitting in the locks watching the water slowly drain, waiting to see the gate in front of my little boat open. It seems like I might be about to paddle through to the next phase of my life.

You see why I haven’t been blogging? I’m like the weird weepy aunt at the family picnic that everyone wishes would go wandering off to find the nearest man selling a horse. Perhaps if I get all this I’m-on-the-threshold business out, I can go back to telling you things about wanting to build a chicken coop and my concern for Tuesday’s dinner. I don’t know though, there’s something different here. I needed that delicate butt kicking. It made my heart grow.

So there we go, a new year, a promise, a confession, and a long winded boat metaphor. It’s as though no time has passed at all. Happy New Year!

Lately.

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First fires:

Early mornings:

Celebrating a birthday (and the man who had it):

Traveling to Atlanta for work:

Watching the light change for Fall:

Growing (and growing!) firewood pile:

Puppy play date love to an excessive and charming degree:

Another season change:

Pumpkin muffins for the boy:

A budding book lover:

Recreating the ocean in the bathtub:

And always this smile:

And because there are no pictures of me to share, I will instead off  a little something that’s been on my mind:

I think that I go back and forth between fancying myself some kind of activist and equally some kind of peace maker. In this political season, I’ve felt the urge to wear both hats, but lately, that second one is feeling more and more correct to me. I’m not apathetic about the value of the political process, but I’m also not sure that I’m comfortable adding more negativity to what is increasingly feeling like a pool of vague buzz words that always seem to be true in one circle and false in another. My gut instinct is that this whole process is going to implode during my life time, and if and when that happens, (and I hope that it does, and I hope that this sentiment is a part of it) it is my hope that it’s done intelligently, compassionately, and not at the cost of our good sense.

I support our right to disagree and I support the foundation of democracy that we’re attempting to still stand on, but I do not support all of the rhetoric that gets tossed around at the cost of forgetting that there are humans behind those words, from both sides. My concern is that we get so attached to our perception of the issues, or to being the most clever or stinging in our rebuttal, that we forget which way is up. I am guilty of this, and that activist in me knows that there are things that I am absolutely willing to fight for, but not at the cost of behaving in a way that I would never allow my toddler to. I’m shelving any public name calling for a while and hoping to create another spot on the internet that isn’t based solely on what’s going wrong, as I still believe that there is a lot that is right. I read this quote in Oxford American’s June issue, and haven’t been able to shake the impact that it had on me: “Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?” (Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter). It’s not that I think, ‘oh, we’re all human so everyone can do anything and be just fine as long as we sugarcoat it and just say nice things’, it’s more that I think that we’re all human, we’re designed to disagree, and that the only way to move forward is to treat each other compassionately, no matter the degree of dissent. This lofty intention is, in my mind, the end of ignorance.

I think that the majority of the folks that I know and spend my time with feel this way, but as a way of affirming this for myself, I thought I might put it out there publicly too. My mouth often gets ahead of my heart, and something that I’ve been working on is being a bit more intentional with the content that I’m generating in this world wide web. I might get proven sorely wrong one day, but for the time being, I’m continuing to hope that it’s true that we can be the change that we wish to see, and in my case, I desperately hope to see a change for the positive.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

2 for Now

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Asher is still going to be 2 for less than a month. The transition from one to two was less stark and we were still counting months (why do we do that? Tricky business, that month counting) but now he’s almost to three and so much more three than two.

There are a couple of habits that we had let dwindle on out of convenience and parent-fear that we wanted to break before turning three. One of them was Asher still sleeping with a pacifier (don’t judge) and so, on the first day in our new house, we were sitting at the table with Asher eating lunch and I asked him if he would like to start sleeping in a big boy bed. He said that yes, he would, and I told him that one of the rules of the big boy bed is that he wouldn’t be able to sleep with a nu-nu (pacifier) anymore. He just looked at me and said as breezily as an almost-three-year-old can, “ok”.

Well ok then.

Ya’ll, I’ve written a lot about all that parenthood has taught us so far, and here’s what I learned from that lesson: we’re morons. Asher wasn’t hanging on to that nu-nu, we were. So now he’s turning three and he doesn’t sleep with a pacifier so we can check that off a list and go commiserate with other stupid parents about the stupid things that we do when we’re underestimating the little people in our lives. (Anyone?)

The first night that Asher slept in his ‘new’ (crib lowered without the front bar on it) bed, we were not terribly surprised to see him standing beside our bed the following morning. He climbed up into bed with us and as he was snuggling, Drew noticed that Asher didn’t have his diaper on anymore. Asher proceeded to tell us that he woke up in his bed, went to the bathroom, took his nighttime diaper off, went potty, flushed–he’s very committed to reporting on every step of the process–and then came upstairs to get us. Whose kid is this? Every morning since then, Asher goes through this little routine with a level of meticulousness most OCD patients would covet and then comes to find us or gets back and bed and starts hollering, “Mama! Can I WAKE UP NOW? MAMA! CAN I…” which is pretty funny. A weird twist is that he will occasionally put his diaper back on, but we’re working on that.

This morning he woke up and I listened to him go through all of his potty steps and then he went back to his room and got back in bed and started singing. He sang to himself for about 20 minutes flying, I think, an airplane around (if the words to the ‘song’ were any indication) and then started calling out to ask if he could wake up. So far his almost three-ness has been a lot more opinions, a lot more freak outs, and a lot more intensity, but if it also means that he’s entering into the stage of life when he can wake up, potty, and play by himself while we squeak out the last little bit of sleep that we can? Sign. Me. Up. Suddenly the child and the puppy are not seeming quite so similar.

It’s getting harder to pinpoint the big changes as they occur because it’s all so rapid-fire. Where this time last year we were able to notice new words popping out and seeing new levels of physical confidence emerge, all of that is starting to happen so seamlessly and quickly that it will just sneak up on us all at once. What is pretty amazing is that Asher is beginning to really be able to express what kind of person he is, and what kind of sense of humor he has and all of the little nuanced things that make us who we are. While we don’t have first steps to marvel over anymore, we do have the changing lilt in his belly laughter, the way his eyebrow moves when he’s speaking frankly, and his insatiable curiosity about why things are the way they are. I think Drew and I both love this stage because we’re starting to see more and more of the person that we’re spending our lives with.

The heart in the storm.

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Remember last week when I wrote my impassioned post about how our new life in our new house? Things took a turn for the…funny?…strange?…unexpected? this weekend.

We think that a tornado came through. The weather service says that it was a windstorm, but the 40-50 downed trees on our new property tell a different story. (Update: NPR informed me last night that it was a derecho.)

The thing is, a lot went right in this situation. First and foremost, no one was hurt. Our car and my stepdad’s truck were in the driveway and are both fine. A tree fell on the house, but only on the porch roof (and actually we didn’t love the way that looked anyway, though I would have happily lived with it and foregone this particular removal method.) and trees grow back. We haven’t moved in and we still have power at our old house. Air Conditioning. Showers.

On the other hand, when I called the insurance company and the claims person said, “wasn’t this policy activated on a home that you just purchased?” I sort of choked up and laughed at the same time. “Yes sir. Actually we closed on the house last Friday. We’ve owned it for a week.”

The driveway fully covered

I thought of a great many ways to describe this experience as Drew and I cut up and hauled tree bits and corpses all day Saturday. It’s like falling really hard for someone only to find out that he’s broken both his legs a week later and now you’re responsible not just for caring for him, but for setting both legs and then bandaging them in casts. It’s like the time that we dropped the birthday cake on the floor just after we lit the candles. Except so much bigger. And Funny. And Heartbreaking. It’s a chance to dig our heels in. It’s like getting punched in the gut and hugged in the same moment by the same person.

Near the end of the day Saturday, as the driveway emerged at our hands from under its temporary suffocation of 20 or so trees, I said to myself, what we’ve lost in shade, we’ve gained in sky. And that’s not a bad position to be in. And I think that’s the one I’m sticking with. I get that this is not the end of the world. It’s actually just about the furthest thing from the end of the world. But it’s still sad. We bought this house for the property. Those leaves whispered to us.

The view from the living room looking out into the front yard/driveway

We have a lot of work to do, we always did. But the face of the land is different and we’re both trying so hard to put on a brave face and tell the house that it’s not that bad, and things like, give it some time and no one will even notice. This house is already a Walton, remember? I would like to think that it’s already seeing the humor in this, it’s an eternal optimist, it’s already telling itself how we’ll be looking back and thinking that if all those trees hadn’t come down, we never would have…

But part of me thinks that the house and the land seem a little sad too. I know that it’s the stuff of idle minds to overly personify a place, so say what you will about my mind, but I can’t help it. I feel a certain self-consciousness from the land that was, as of Friday night, used to turning heads.

Trees grow back. Hurt feelings mend. Sad stories ultimately have their hilarious moments. Remember how we waited 7 years to buy a house and a week later a tornado ripped through the land? Our new home had two broken legs and we set them and then bandaged them with casts. We wanted something to invest in, and here we are with sap in our hair, hesitantly declaring ourselves to be fully invested.

The before and after of the driveway starts to give a better idea of just how many trees caught the wind.

Addendum:

When we were in the midst of the treemaggedon (treesanity? treepocolypse?) over the weekend we just kind of immediately got down to business and it didn’t really sink in that this was the new reality of our house. I woke up Monday morning and the sadness kind of settled in, but being a Debbie Downers is pretty much for the birds, so now I’m back to thinking that it’s all going to be fine. I felt a genuine cultural loss when Nora Ephron passed away last week and I’ve been reading or re-reading her writing since then. She has a lot of gems, but in an older article from the New Yorker in which she writes about a long term love affair with an apartment that came to an end, she concludes the article by saying, “It’s not love. It’s just where I live”. Our house was shaken this week, but it seems that our Home is still firmly intact. I’m so thankful that we’re mourning the aesthetic losses to our land and not something that might actually be of consequence.

Moving.

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First a note from Management:

I have never ever ever ever been pulled in as many directions or as busy in my adult life as I have been in the last two months. There’s not another way to say it. It’s been fine, just hectic, and there were a couple of days in there where I was having some trouble breathing, but by and large it’s just been a laundry list of this, and then that, uh oh! that too, oh! and also this…and if I’m being totally honest, I go to bed by about 10 every night (you know, just after I drink my prune juice and watch Matlock) so there’s that too. The blog got the busy shaft, and some day I’m going to be reading back and saying, ahhhhh yes. May and June of 2012…holy wow that was total insanity. Some things just don’t really need to be preserved.

One of the things that we’ve been doing involved a lot of faxing and phone calls and signing and drumming of fingernails and holding of breath because we bought a house. Wait, sorry, gimme a second shot on that. We bought a house!! After a 3 day closing we finally signed the dotted line and let our breaths out.

We bought this house and I can’t wrap my mind around it. It’s walls and a place to be but it’s also…

Roots.

And not just roots in the sense that we’re rooted per se, who knows what the future holds, but it’s roots in the sense that there’s a place to finally soak up everything that pours out of this family, and now we are in a space where we might be able to actually wring it all back out too. In the 5 days that this house has been ours, it has absorbed so much already. Most notably a lot of paint, but beyond that, it’s absorbed hugs from friends and gallons of our parent’s sweat, and the sound of Asher laughing maniacally as he runs across the yard. In just 120 hours, this house has ballooned out with ambition and ideas and what ifs and oh yes! and maybe this can go there? and bad radio that helps the paint brushes keep time, and let’s knock down that wall and look! raspberry bushes! It’s only taken 7200 minutes for this house to become a Walton.

In this way, it’s kind of like we’ve both developed a really big crush on the same person and now we’re all in the glow of young love all over again. Bear with me, but this has absolutely nothing to do with light fixtures and square footage and closet space, and everything to do with the feeling of making one more knot in the rope that binds our life together. Much like when Drew and I looked and Asher and then looked at each other and felt that little click of knowing that we were permanently bound to one another, we are now standing and staring at oak trees and thinking, click.

Boxes are getting packed, our ridiculously amazing parents are spending hours helping us turn a house into our home, windows are wide open, and in all of it, I just look around in awe at how much is pouring out and getting soaked up. The usual suspects of blood, sweat, and tears are there, but also…profound gratitude, relief, giddiness, anticipation, gratitude, excitement, gratitude–those are there too.

Maybe it’s that I’m finally cresting the wave and easing down its other side, but right now, I can breathe again. I am freaking out about watching new light wash over new leaves. When we stand in the yard we don’t hear other people and car radios and firetrucks, we just hear birds and wind. There’s a bear that wants our garbage and squeaky floor boards under the stairs. Asher begs Drew to lift him up so that he can put a basketball through the basketball net, and there isn’t a stick of furniture in the house, but the fridge is full. We are full. We are breathing.

I’m so thankful that I haven’t written about the last two months so that this entry might just be what I remember. There was a storm, and then the clouds broke, and then we could see all that was before us.