Spring Cleaning

On Yardwork:

Alas, no matter how clean you make your yard, it is still comprised of 98 percent dirt.

Sticks and Slugs:

At some point this evening I bent down to pick up a stick, which turned out to be a slug, and as I jumped away like a frightened school girl, well after, I remembered that as a child we used to play on the sidewalk with snails and poke slugs with sticks. It is hard to say if tonight was revenge.

Small sadness:

By the time we got to the whiskey we were already full of deli meat and cider. This strikes me as falling on the lower scale of human tragedy.

Conversations:

S: I don't think s does well with crazy crazy schedules.

M: What baby does?

Afternoons:

About once every two days, when I just want to sit and relax for a bit, I'll pull s onto my chest and try to breathe slowly, to mimic the heartbeat in the womb. And every once in a while, one in ten times, she lies on my stomach for longer than a minute or two without starting to cry. Today, we sat on a beige blanket, with the limbs of a large oak shading our eyes, and I closed my eyes for fifteen minutes while she stared up at a pale bluish sky, and the birds flitting from place to place followed by her eyes. And I kept telling my heart to slow down even more that this moment of peace could not last forever.

Don't trim the Juniper:

As we are walking to the car I notice bits of glass in the street that I step past because I have bare feet. Later, when we are moving heavier things to smaller cars I notice a speck of glass in front of our own sidewalk and this time I bend down and pick it up and another just like it, and I walk across the yard and drop them in the juniper bush that we never trim. They are some other fool's problem now.

Spring Cleaning:

The baby's toys are migrating downstairs. The distance is somewhat shorter than the 22,000 traveled by terns, but no less impressive in all the spaces that are revealed between wing beats and bits of green wall.