Sky can't decide what it wants today. Clouds a filmy pashmina with blue breaking through. You woke snotty and irritable this morning. Temperature of 102.4. By mid-morning Tylenol had brought it down to 100 or so.
But we skipped baby yoga. And Nanny Barb cancelled on us for both today and Friday. So there's been a lot of stillness here.
We sat in the rocker for a long time. Looked out the window. Brown oak leaves skittering across the snow. The snow itself pockmarked, dead plants like spindles poking through the crust. Three pine needles on the white window sill. The skein of a spider web pressed to the pane itself. A crusted yellow scab of something on the knuckle of your left pinky. Below your fine hair, patches of cradle cap like tiny drips of wax. A glass jar with a few forgotten jellybeans: four purple, one yellow, one white, one pink, one black. The cold sound the jellybeans made against the glass. The endless wiping of trails of slime--onto a kleenex, onto a burp cloth decorated with turquoise elephants, onto a baby wipe, onto the collar of my hyacinth fleece. Your temple against my jaw. Kisses along your hairline.
Then, in the other part of my brain, there are the things to do, to consider, to remember, and this place feels like a lottery ball, whooshing ping pong balled numbers in a perfectly contained storm. An index to finish for one book, a title needed for another. Two courses to plan. A manuscript to check for errors, for the incorrect use of CAPs, for facts and images communicated correctly, cleanly. Texts to send to friends. The Chicago Manual of Style to master. E-mails to send about courses and birthday parties and childcare. A grocery list and three important thank you notes that need to be written (Becky and Charlie, one is coming someday, I promise). The logistical detritus of the everyday that whirrs and whirrs, that will not be still.
We are a slow chaos, Matteus, a kind of half-paralyzed tsunami. We are two striations of cloud colliding in the equivocating sky.
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