Coming Back

Tomorrow Moe is three weeks old.  I'm starting to feel more myself again physically.  The kids and I are fairly settled in to the rhythm of me being home with them again.  I showered two days in a row.  All good things.

So tonight, to take advantage of the gloriously windy warm night, I walked Emilia's invitations down to the mailbox.  Before I left, Chris said, "Be careful."  Good advice at nearly 11pm.

Detour.

All through September and October, I've been experiencing this strange deception in which I step outside (of school, a store, my car, the house) and sniff the air and think "Ah, I'm so glad spring is here!"  ...Then, soon enough, reality sets in and I realize that what I'm smelling in the air are the last gasps of summer and that any day now, winter will set in, cold in my bones.  Even in the snow and hail at Emilia's soccer game Saturday, I stood shuddering in denial.  I think, after the most trying and emotionally exhausting summer of my life, something in the back of my heart wants a do-over so desperately that even the scent in the air sends me running headlong into the deception that spring is here and summer is coming.  Either it means I get that magical do-over or it means that winter's already over and the next summer is coming.  A different sort of chance at redemption.

Tonight on my walk, the neighborhood was mostly quiet aside from the traffic sounds and the intermittent bursts of laughter and shouting from the new neighbors a few doors down.  I was walking alone for the first time since the baby was born.  Walking at night, my favorite walking time.  Walking with mail in my hand.  The streetlights in our neighborhood cast a warm amber glow on everything, making it feel cozier and safer. Things felt right at home, like everything was in its place.

I wondered if perhaps I was involved in another strange deception.  In the last two months, kids were shooting guns at the end of our street in broad daylight, our car was broken into in the middle of the afternoon, and once again we considered moving away.  But tonight, it felt so comfortable and peaceful to walk through my neighborhood alone in the dark, I wondered if we were wrong to consider getting out of town.  I looked around for an answer, but all I heard was the leaf song of the oak trees on the boulevard, the lush ocean-roar of their summer sound giving way to the raspy rattle of their browning foliage.