November 5, 2009

Sheen of frost on everything this morning: deck, leaves, grass, branches. As I nursed you on Ricki and Peter's couch this morning, we were gored by the sun. That's how it felt, suddenly heaving itself over the edge of the neighbor's roof and boring through the window pane and lighting my hair where it fell away from my face and turning the colors of your cow sleeper (lime green and pink) one shade lighter.

A picture book fall day today. I will push you in the stroller around Lake Harriet saying "duck, water, lake, please-stop-your-fussing."

You stirred a lot in your sleep last night, making miniature cries that sounded like waking. The space heater under the window, now 20 years old, also made a sound like crying, a distant high-pitched whining, when it heated up.

Your father is 30 miles down the road in Northfield. His first night without us.

Dunn Brothers Coffee is filled with gray-haired men in glasses who rest their elbows on the table and lean toward one another slightly to hear better. The mothers who come here are usually around 40, new running shoes and short, stylish haircuts worried slightly by the wind. They move with a sort of feigned haggardness and roll their eyes at the barrista while trying to coax a toddler from where he pants against the juice cooler or a seven-year-old from where she presses her index finger against the glass again and again saying, "the blueberry one, mama, I want the blueberry." Outside the coffee shop there is always a patient and bored-looking dog tied to a slim tree, a jogging stroller nestled in carefully beside him.

I am thankful for this day. For the warmth of this coffee shop, for hanging plants whose leafed limbs dangle down into space, for your conductor's hands that reach out suddenly as you sleep, for your blue eyes and good health, for the folded give of your grandparents' skin and the plump expansion of yours, for the warm heat in the BMW, and for the BMW that will, God willing, take us back to Daddy through blue skies and trees that hang suspended between color and nakedness.