September 25, 2009

Raining like mad this morning. First heavy rain since your birth. It has been dry and hot all this month but many of the leaves have turned and fallen anyway leaving red shadows below the trees. Still, it feels odd to walk through the crunching and not to feel cold air creeping in around the neck and cuffs of a sweatshirt. It is the weather described in Keats' "Ode to Autumn"--the oozing, the fumes of poppies, and Autumn herself asleep on a granary floor. Yesterday, we walked up to campus with Ricki to show you off to the English department. When we passed the football practice fields (GO OLES #1 sprayed into the hillside) I thought of James Wright's autumn poem, the sons who grow suicidally beautiful and gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

This year, you are my autumn poem. All weather and sounds and smells are tempered or sweetened or mellowed by you. It is 11:20am and the rain has finally stopped but even from here I can see the water hanging onto the leaves. Mary Chapin Carpenter is singing about halcyon days and jubilee and you are asleep on my chest. Last night you slept more than you ever have before so today seems bright and alive with possibility in spite of the rain. With eight hours of sleep pumping below my skin I feel invincible! My brain feels capable of stupendous feats! Of course, the morning discussion then revolved around WHY you slept so well. Was it the clock radio that I turned to pure static and placed on the bed next to you? Was it the two hours of almost continuous feeding you did from 11:00-12:30? Was it the "letting off steam" (ie fussing) you did with Daddy from 10:15-11:00? Was it that I tucked you in closer to me last night, my cheek against the top of your head and my hand pressed against your double-swaddled hands to keep them from thrashing? But you are still too young for the nonsense of patterns and schedules. Pied beauty. You are a dappled thing with a God-given inscape and sometimes we are invited in and sometimes we stand outside you in the warm rain, red leaves around our feet, our mouths formed into small "o"s of wonder.