A Very Very Very Fine House

The words to this old Crosby Stills &  Nash song keep singing themselves in my head every minute here at this new-baby house where Annie and I have come to help.  This is Annie and not mother Sooz here holding baby Peter but we had both forgotten what it’s like in such a house, where it's all so hushed and still. One minute we're talking and leafing through magazines and the next we're all out cold. Even when we first arrived late Thursday night there was that feeling, the child reposing in his reclining baby rickshaw atop a coffee table Kevin made back in his college days and would certainly throw away now if Susie hadn’t pronounced it good. (Look what it says though Mum!” (Susie has always called me Mum.) “It says all this over here is the living room, while all that” - and she gestures to a table six feet away - “is the dining room!”It’s a sizeable room if a tad small for 5 people and 3 pets to be spending days at a stretch but who would want to be anywhere else with that new-baby fairy dust still dancing in the air? In this moment here captured the people are just hanging out, the cats have just stepped down from their padded high-rise, the famous coffee table is acting in its key room-dividing role and the mystified but noble Bosco is keeping watch over all.Now click on this performance of a great old song of praise to domestic joy and imagine that a BABY is speaking the lyrics: (Come to me now/And rest your head for just five minutes/ Everything is good./Staring at the fire/For hours and hours/While I listen to you/Play your love songs/All night long for me/Only for me. Ah![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtJWJe_K_w]