Windows

It's cooled down enough to open the windows at night.  My husband does it; by the time the temperature dips below the temperature on the indoor thermostat, I've tunneled too far into sleep to care. But when I wake in the very early morning to take over baby duty, nearly every window in the house gapes and the is house riddled with cool air.

You notice things, when the windows are open.  The stridency of the birds, for instance.  At dawn they are like Trump supporters at a MAGA rally, shouting the same thing over and over and over.  The absence of the highway's hum.  The surprising comings and goings of your neighbors, some unknown party crawling out of bed at 4:00 AM on a Saturday to slam the car door and murmur into the cool.

The paperboy, who is not a boy at all, arrives early in the 5:00 AM hour: the grumble of a slow-moving, poorly-maintained vehicle accompanied by a slightly ominous series of repetitive pops, papers dinging sidewalks and lawns and cars.

It's borrowed time.  The house is waking up; the temperature is rising.

Squirrels

Squirrels are so brainlessly agile.  On my walk this morning (stolen,  too short), one of them leapt three feet sideways from a low branch to a garden stake, weightless as an astronaut, seemingly released from obligations to pesky things like gravity and physics.

It was, in the manner of squirrels, after a bird feeder.

For several years during my middle childhood, my father waged drawn-out, futile war over the bird feeder he'd erected in our back yard.  He'd wanted songbirds.  Instead he got fat, upside-down squirrels, clinging by their toes to crosspieces, vampiric, noses deep in the seed.

He tried rearrangement.  He tried noise deterrence.  He ran at them personally, gibbering and pulling faces like a deranged clown.  He gambled on the application to the feeder of a sticky goop that, while purported to drive off squirrels, merely made the rodents' movements more precise, their journey to the bird feeder that much more balletic.

The last thing he tried was acceptance.  We fed the squirrels, and they were beautiful.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are so terribly ephemeral.

Yes, there are tomato-shaped objects available year-round at your nearest grocery store.  These items are even called "tomatoes," and they do bear a strong visual resemblance to the real deal.

But they are not tomatoes.  Tomatoes appear in July or possibly August, the fat lip of the year, and they hang around only through the throaty part of summer, the hot-damp days and firefly nights.  Come fall, they vanish, replaced by pasty doppelgängers.

I know my summer has been too full when I've forgotten about tomatoes.  And lately, alas, that's been the case: I can't recall a summer in the last eight years in which I have not moved house or moved states or faced an insect infestation or changed jobs had a child, or sometimes several of these things at once.

This summer is a baby summer, but I did remember tomatoes yesterday, stealing out of the house to head to the farmer's market down the road.

I bought four.  They were exorbitantly expensive and not particularly prepossessing, moderate globes of yellow and pink and red.  I will eat them plain and messy, not bothering with the knife.

Grind

Imagine a worm cut in two and then cut in two and then cut in two again until your hands are filled with a heap of little worms.  This is a bit what maternity leave is like.

It's the repetition that gets to me.  Each day is the long, wriggling twin of the day that came before, and also the day that came before that, and also of tomorrow.  You get up, you feed the baby, you change the diaper, you jolly the baby to sleep, you wash the bottles, you sit for a minute or maybe get really ambitious and try to unload the dishwasher, you get up, you feed the baby, etc.  Over and over and over and over, for literal months -or if you don't go back to work, years.  It's what I imagine incarceration must be like: day day day day day day day.

I can't tell if everyone finds the repetition as grinding as I do, or if I am constitutionally ill-suited to today's version of stay-at-home mothering.  Maybe there's a way to spice up the iterations I haven't figured out yet.  Or maybe it's like gardening- something I'd dearly love to enjoy, but, despite many attempts at emotional reform and a past strewn with dead plants, continue to detest.  

I claim to crave stability, but I pursued three different majors in college and my work life is startlingly varied.  Maybe I wandered into multiple careers and freelancing because I have a secret yearning for instability.  Or maybe years of career whiplash have made me a variety addict, jonesing for the next twist.

Speculation is useless, but it gives me something to do while I repeat.

Dawn

There are still those slivers of time in which everyone in the house miraculously, simultaneously sleeps, and I steal outside to make sure the world is still there.

It's dawn.  The sky is sparking in the east.  The trees steal back into the visible world, and the birds shout mine mine mine. Sometime before the sky kindled, the paperboy came and left. OK for now.

Hello!

Do you have things you want profoundly, but only in the future or the past?

I often feel this way about socializing.  I am a substantially happier person when I socialize. I'm always glad when I've done it, and I very much want to do more in future.  I'm an introvert, but a very socially oriented one; I know that life is made up of relationships encompassing and glancing, and I find time with others deeply rewarding....

....later.  Or tomorrow.  Just maybe not right this second.

Mostly I've learned to work around myself on this one, but the fatigue is a hurdle I have to clear each and every time I undertake to expand my social circle and forge new connections.

I'm actively seeking out new friendships at the moment, because while I have made some wonderful friends in St. Louis, I'd like to make more connections in my immediate neighborhood.  I know it's a good idea.  All the times in my adult life during which I've actively undertaken to make new friends (the last couple of times I've moved; the last time I had a child) have proved incredibly rewarding. Not every interaction bears fruit, but many of them do, whether that fruit is a deep and lasting friendship or just someone to tell you where to get the good cheese.  I want to do it and I know I will be glad to have done it.

In a minute.  Or two.

Fatigue

Am I the only person who lies awake for three hours in the middle of the night in anticipation that the infant will wake and force me to lie awake for three hours in the middle of the night?  Anyone?

There are parts of myself that I loathe.