Wonder

What have we been up to, you ask? This.

Becoming grown-ups, of both the 4-year-old variety and the 34-year-old one. Trying not to yell at each other. Eating sweet potatoes and kale. Vet appointments, Squinkie towers, reading lessons.

Nothing and everything.

—

Our days have been syrup slow, stretching and sticking into a clump of unnamed weeks. When I look at the calendar, I see both fullness and emptiness. What have we been up to? What did we make of this summer?

What do we have to show for it all?

Nothing and everything.

—

Ken took a few business trips. I went to yoga, the coffee shop. Bee and I visited zoo camp, ballet. Playdates. I think I remember a massage somewhere in there, but that could’ve been last spring?

And yet, it has been the sweetest summer yet.

We’ve been home, together, simultaneously changed and unchanged. Our own four walls orbiting the sun.

—

Want to know what makes me cry each and every time? This.

It’s just life at home, a family mostly trying to get along, but it’s slow and it’s sweet and it’s everything I remember my childhood to be.

Playing in the yard, burgers on the grill, each of us so busy doing nothing at all.

Summer.

—

And that’s what life feels like, currently. Learning to love each other, learning to be content in our own small, quiet existence. Forgetting to buy dog food, burning the eggs.

So happy, so tired.

—

I have a tendency to measure my life in events, in the family vacations and the sweeping celebrations and the well-documented days. But that’s not what I’ll remember about this summer.

Instead, I’ll remember how it felt.

That it felt like what I’ve always wanted.

The slow whirl of a film strip spinning to a gritty Joe Cocker, the smell of charcoal in the air.

(And maybe Norma Arnold’s rad outfit.)

So happy, so tired.

Getting by with a little help from our friends.