Here

Bluer sky; limestone.
Oaks again: tall ones, pin, white-
but why this red dirt?

Coffee

My son has a smattering of words.  It's a strictly curated, though steadily increasing, collection; he amasses and disburses his words carefully, like currency.  His vocabulary takes him places (up, down); it describes his desires (mommy, wawa) or sparksa smile (hi, bye).

To an even greater extent, his words limn what looms large in his world -a glimpse into the otherwise opaque toddler brain.   My son has 40 words, maybe more, maybe less- and because the set is circumscribed, each individual word takes on greater importance.   Some speak to proximity- Mommy, Daddy, Kitty.  Others to perceptual salience- Ambulance! Airplane!   And some are unfathomable- Button, Elmo.

And coffee. "Coffee, coffee!" my toddler cries, jabbing at the burr grinder, the cups, the beans.  He serves me pretend coffee in a plastic cup, and laughs when I slurp it down.  "Coffee!" he screams, correctly, at church; "coffee" to the travel mug in the car.

I am charmed by this.   I am also sobered.  Our children are ever and irrevocably themselves.  But sometimes, too, they are mirrors-  small, slobbery, fractured reflections of our bean-stained days.

New new new

The process of settling into a new home is made more complicated when you know you'll leave. After four years of homeowning in Virginia, we're renting for a year in St. Louis- so we'll be here 12 months, maybe less, before having to haul and pack and reacclimate once more.

And so the place-learning process -the divining of the best route from the dresser to the closet, the acclimation to the new angle of the morning sun, the repeated movement of the hand from the tea cupboard to the kettle and back- becomes fraught.

I'll learn the best place to catch the afternoon light- but not for long.  I'll enjoy the porch- but not for long.  I'll tolerate the closet- but not for long.

A sense of impermanence stains things.  It seeps into the manner in which you fall in love, the ways in which you make yourself comfortable- or not.

Impermanence shouldn't do this, of course-  every home, everything, is impermanent. 

But somehow, to love, you need to be able to forget that.  And I can't.  Yet.

Close

The sky is almost, but not quite, the right color.   Closer, oh yes- less bone-colored, less bleached- but still not quite the blue I remember rushing into my eyes when I cracked my lids, lying on my back in the grass, the blades of it scraping my skin, the whine of the cicadas lapping against my ears, that fat, wet air.

Though there's something to be said for a near miss.

I'm closer to home, then- but farther, too.  Because this house is not mine, and the things in it, all the cheap furniture I dragged halfway across the country, looks only vaguely familiar crouching in its new corners, and the lamps are broken, and I have no friends.

Moving is a mower-down, a knocker-flat.  You grow a life, let it creep up around you, and then all of a sudden it's scraped to its base.

Yet still, wheeling over you, that sky-