A robin sat on a bald bush and peered through the screen of our kitchen door.
Then a workman came and fiddled with that old curved window in the attic.
He really knows what he's doing and what a great pleasure that is to see in someone.
He‘ll be back in a month when the new panes of glass have been fashioned -' the storm windows too.
It's cold in this old lady of a house. I hope fixing these windows helps.
Today I also thought about that son of mine quoted here the other day as a little boy. He starts a new job next week. I thought how thin he is, like his great-grandfather Chauncey Payne and his uncle Toby. We named him not for that man but for a different great grandfather who was smallish but handsome too, ah handsome. Twice widowed, he never stopped serving as eye candy to the good women who watched him live his upright life.
I thought about Michael's sister Annie in her new place 40 minutes west of here.
I thought about Annie and Michael's sister Carrie and her Chris, the two new mothers of yesterday’s post.
When I think of their baby I feel that old tingling in my shirtfront, hard as that may be to believe. "Sarah laughed" remember? Then along came Isaac. Miracles abound.
When I think of this earnestly scowling new soul I think too of her two older brothers who stayed with us all weekend.
Before dawn on their last morning here, the little one came thundering across the bare floor of the upstairs hall and burrowed under the covers with us. Ten minutes later the other one appeared. It was still dark and nobody spoke. We lay quiet for 30 whole minutes.
Only David their grandfather kept his eyes closed. We three others looked out at the window and around the room. We stretched and shifted and pummeled our pillows and nestled back down in them. The younger one, still only four, raised his hands to the ceiling and waved them around in a pattern. The big one, eight, hung his feet over the edge of the bed and sighed. We maintained the silence as if by one accord.
Maybe we were thinking how our lives had changed as they surely have, and in a twinkling too: Old Dave and I now have a granddaughter who, I imagine, will understand us without our ever having to offer a word of explanation. These two little boys now have a sister who I bet will help them understand themselves, in both good times and bad.
What a miracle it is when new people come into your life. When the new people are babies because you just know you’re going to love them. But the real miracle comes when the news people are not babies at all or even relatives but just people you know you'll be walking with for at least this next stretch of the road. You don’t KNOW you’re going to love them but you end up loving them, for their sheer flawed familiarity as fellow human beings.
I think loving is the default human stance, I really do. Love your enemies said that guy Jesus, which I take to mean Pay attention to them long enough so that Compassion flows in where Judgment once was.
This was my day yesterday and these the thoughts that came to me in it.
