I think it was last night, driving home from pizza -- or maybe the night before, driving home from our bookstore excursion, followed by dinner at Veggie Grill -- when my son dropped his shoes to the floor of the car, peeled off his socks, and stretched his bare toes towards us.
"Ugh, I actually smell feet," Matt said.
Without missing a beat, Isaac hollered gleefully, "Smell them! Smell them as much as you can. Put your nose right on them."
This afternoon, Matt headed into the mountains for a little cross-country skiing. The kids and I went to lunch at Marlene's, a Natural Foods market and deli we love. Because it is Suzannah's 9 and 3/4 birthday (Harry Potter fans will appreciate that) and also because why not, we shared a little special dessert. Downstairs, I picked up a few last-minute ingredients for dinner: a few avocados and some enchilada sauce. Isaac carefully lifted the jars into the basket for me, and Suzannah made dramatic gagging noises.
"Can we please work on your rudeness, Child?" I said. "Have you ever even tasted green enchilada sauce?"
"Yeah, Zannah," Isaac chimed in. "You won't know if you like something until you try it."
"Isaac, don't be the mom," his big sister replied.
"He's right, though," I said.
"Yeah, but you always tell me not to be the mom."
She is also right.
Tonight, Matt told me that Isaac quoted me at breakfast, too. He'd picked up donuts for the kids, a rare Sunday treat (oh, so much sugar today) and there might have been a bit too much examination of who had more donut, or frosting, or whatever, and Isaac said something about how we don't measure our lives in fairness or bites of food or something. I didn't hear it. But I'm always telling the kids that the only reason they should be checking out what someone else has is to make sure they have enough, not to whine about what they think they should have.
(I guess what I'm saying is that I'm grateful for all of these little moments and I want to remember them. And I have enough.)
My birthday was on Friday, and following the little tradition I've established for myself for the past two years (since my children outgrew the toddler stage of catching every single winter bug and passing it through our family, which means I'm not using up all of my wellness leave at work), I took the day off. I've called in exactly once this year, and that was to stay home with a sick kiddo, so I felt no guilt about this. I had a perfect day. Truly. It went like this: I slept in until 7:00, drank my coffee, opened cards from my family, dropped off the kids at school, and then went for a four-mile run in the sunshine. February is almost always full of beautiful days here; we forget this in November when it's rainy and blustery, but February means the first breath of spring, the first cherry blossoms, the first revving lawn mowers. I walked up my street in the morning quiet and thought about how much I love our little house in this neighborhood, the one we stumbled into back in 2003. The air smelled like heaven and the birds were singing. I have several different routes mapped out, depending on how far or how long I want to run; I can squeeze in a quick 30 minutes before I pick up the kids sometimes, or I can do two longer loops that never take me far from my house but that will make me run a total of 3.6 miles, or I can go on a longer four-mile loop...I had all the time in the world on Friday, and the morning was crisp and bright. I jogged the four miles, breathing the scent of fresh mud and blossoms and leaves. I felt both in the world and in my head: traffic pulsed around me when I turned onto busier streets, but mostly I was just moving to the music Matt downloaded to my phone, and feeling really, really good.
After I showered I met Kyanne at one of my favorite coffee shops. She didn't quite make it to work either, since we'd both attended "Short Takes: The World of Emily Dickinson" at ACT Theater on Thursday night (so fun!), and it was clearly unreasonable to expect us to go to work the next day (because we went out for dessert afterwards and we are not twenty-one anymore). And then we ate lunch at the Rosewood Cafe, and they had my very favorite salmon chowder that makes me just so deeply happy to be alive in the world, and also I had a glass of wine, of course, because normally my weekday lunches have to happen in fifteen minutes if I also want time to pee before my last class of the day.
After lunch I walked around for a long time by myself, just meandering through the streets of Tacoma, noticing the cherry blossoms falling over the sidewalks (my very favorite sign of spring), gazing at Puget Sound, and feeling so lucky that these things are part of my beautiful, everyday life if I simply pause to see them. By mid-afternoon the clouds had settled in over the sound, and the air was so still. I walked, just to breathe the air, just to look at the water, just to move by myself in the world for awhile and think, until I had to drive back home to pick up the kids. By then, the first fat splatters of rain hit my windshield. By the time the kids and I left for Seattle to meet Matt at the Elliott Bay Book Company, we were caught in a full downpour. The drive took an hour, far longer than usual, but my son fell asleep almost immediately and slept the entire way. Suzannah stared pensively out the window, and I listened to music.
Matt was waiting when I pulled into the parking lot across the street from the bookstore, paying for my parking before I could unload the kids. He read with them in the children's section while I browsed and made my little stack, and he added chocolate when I carried my books to the register. We ate a cozy dinner at Veggie Grill, by no means a fancy restaurant but one of my favorites anyway.
I could do this every year, just to be reminded that simple things make me so happy.
I've said to Matt a few times over the years that when I get to age _____ he should really throw me a party, that we should invite a bunch of people and make it a thing. But I think I'm done pretending I want that, because here's the truth: I am really bad at parties. I don't want them for myself. When I attend other people's parties I usually have a good time once I get there, because I make sure I know someone there and am therefore safe, but I have to really talk myself into going and will do almost anything to get out of them. I fully admit that I want to be included, but I'm just not good at them. I suspect I wouldn't be any good at my own party, either. I've basically designed my own introvert's birthday dream, and maybe I should just go with that. For an entire day I felt so deeply content I couldn't imagine wanting anything other than exactly what I have.
The serenity didn't last, of course, because then other things happened this weekend: I read the news, I read an upsetting Facebook post, Donald Trump still exists in the real world and not just in my nightmares, Isaac was horrifically grumpy last night, I overreacted to something at dinner, I didn't get the vacuuming done. As a result, I found myself in a cloudier headspace this morning, and I wrote an entire blog entry in my head about all of that. But I'm saving that for later and posting this instead, because as the day winds down, somehow, miraculously, even though it is Sunday night and I am often given to the Sunday Blues, my little family brings me back to where I should be: in this cozy house in our little corner of the world, where we smell trees and water, where I know these streets. Where I will tuck my children into bed soon, and one will protest that I'm kissing her too much and one will say something like, "I love you, Mommy, and I am going to eat off your head." Where I will brew a cup of tea and read more of Anna Karenina and engage in a little good-natured trash talk with the other adult in this house about who will finish their big fat Russian novel first. (Shari and Tolstoy are definitely winning against Matt and Dostoyevsky, if anyone cares to keep track.) Where I am content to be exactly where I am.
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