Arrivals

We are fully settled here. There have been moments such as now, when my son settles gently into sleep, when I've lately been thinking of the night before my son was born. I called the doctor at 3 a.m., who let me know I could either come in right away or wait until 7:30 a.m. if I wanted to. Unlike in the movies, with its portrayal of water-breaking announcements followed by dramatic painful contractions, his arrival was a subtle and easy one.

I opted for the morning arrival at the hospital, as it seemed that it would be slow going. So I took a nice long shower, braided my hair, and wrote up some detailed substitute lesson plans for the next day, which was to be a Friday. As the sun began to rise I went down to my car and drove to the parking lot two blocks away from the hospital where I was to give birth. At the parking lot, I removed myself, then my two duffel bags from the car, and hoisted the latter over my shoulder. I must have been a sight, in my long black coat, like some gravid matronly sandman, with bags of sleep dust over her shoulder. A nice young doctor asked me if I needed help. "I'm fine!" I chirped, as we were just across the street from my destination.

I walked in the lobby, checked in, asked for a towel to sit on, and waited to be admitted. I was humming with anticipation, excited to meet my little son.

That walk from my car to the hospital was short and uneventful - no huffing and puffing, and the two pillows and assorted clothes and books I'd brought were no big thing to tote. But for some reason, whenever I drive through these woods, as we both gaze out at trees revealing splashes of fiery red, I think of that walk I first took with my boy on his way and I burn with intense love for the things I have done.

We walk everywhere together now - he doesn't care for riding in the stroller, so he hops out of the car with his fingertips on my palms when we arrive somewhere, and we stride, hand in hand, towards doors and home. "Go, go, go?" my son asks.

"Here we go," I reply; happy, brave, and free.

Check, please!

This morning, after a few bite-fuls of waffle, my son let out a sigh of contentment, and said (it sounded like,) "Check!"

Letting It Sink In

I'm still just so in awe of the beauty of it here. The small-town everything. One Saturday morning, we went to the post office in the next village, and it was empty and this nice fella came out to sell me my one stamp that I needed. He noticed my Netflix envelope I was going to take outside. "Here, I can take care of that for you." he offered. It's like that everywhere here.

There's a general store I pass on one route to school that always has a sign out front advertising lobster rolls. There's this patch of landscape that I pass on the other route, rolling misty hills, green and layered, that always makes me think of reading "The Secret Garden" when I was little and I say to myself, "The Moor." (Type it into Google Images. That's what it looks like. The landscape, not the images of Othello.)


Further on, there's this boat ramp. One of these days I want to drive down it, to take a picture of the water I cross every day. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow, as we head out to errands and the good playground.