It's a Saturday morning. Under a wide blue sky, the big-hearted autumn sun warms up a world which had cooled off overnight. Everyone is asleep. Hubby, my not-quite-two-year-old Little One, and my Puppy-Girl.
I'm standing at my laptop at the kitchen counter, a hot teacup at grateful hand. I could take my laptop and go and sit on the couch and curl up beneath a warm rug. In fact, I'd like very much to go and do that. But then Puppy-Girl, who's sleeping at my feet, wouldn't be able to follow me through the child-proof gate. And I don't want to lessen our little pocket of quiet time together. Just me and her. Not to mention, she will then move to sit at the gate so she can regard me reproachfully. So I tell myself that standing to type is good for me.
In this little oasis of time, I breathe and my thoughts start to settle. I can stop having to react to everything, and let my thoughts slow and stretch. Think a little bit. Mull. Be introspective. Turn inwards, outwards, upwards. Maybe get pensive. Or playful. As with all good introverts, if I don't get spaces of quiet time to renew, the world quickly starts fraying at the edges.
It's felt like a frantic week. Working fulltime from home, Little One has been going through a growth spurt and one of the last bouts of teething, and has been rearranging likes and dislikes at whim while we slowly try to get our bearings again of what we can and can't use as go-to activities and distractions and playtime. And throw into the mix Puppy-Girl's upset tummy, which required urgent runs into the garden, 3-4 times throughout the night.
Why don't I leave her outside, you ask? Because she's an excellent guard dog, who will bark remorselessly and furiously at anything that moves, including lizards, possums and any other night creatures. She's also an excellent escape artist and she's very attached to her family and will yip indefatiguably until she's let back inside. So, long story short, she stays inside at night.
On one occasion this week, at 2am, I had Little One wrapped in a blanket in my arms, and we stood under the stars by the Poinciana tree at the bottom of the garden while Puppy-Girl searched for and ate grass to settle her stomach. The resident possum sat in the darkness and made its characteristic growls, which sounds nothing so much like kicking over the engine of a possum-sized motorbike. Little One responded by pointing eagerly towards the noise, growling back, blowing it kisses and then telling it to shush.
The haywire magic of family domesticity. To use a fancy French word: bouleversant - translating to 'overwhelming', but which literally also means to knock over a ball. Knock it off its feet, so the world tips upside down, but it rolls and bounces, and finds its feet again. Bouleversant and magical all at once. Interchangeable, memorable little moment, but also so ordinary as to only exist as one of a thousand other magical, tumultuous and mundane moments. And they fade so quickly. Not their magic, but those moments. They recede and slip into the past, along with many thousands of others. Jumbled and chaotic and beautiful all together. But difficult to isolate individual ones to remember. Like the sun sparkles on a dancing sea - magic and elusive to return to and capture.
Reliving snippets which are becoming wisps which are fading as they get replaced by more immediate memories, as I try and keep their immediacy and capture them in present tense, in my few and far between slivers of writing time.
Finding this in my drafts folder, more than 4 years later, and being in heart-tugged awe - at how long ago this was, how the world is different now, and how I can remember snippets of some of these moments but not others.
And how I wrote it with love ❤️
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