"I love the mornings of things."

That's a quote from N, who was seven at the time and turns eleven today.

What child looks a little mournfully at the passing of his own childhood? One who feels everything, naturally. Mine, naturally. Every year since he said that, he's expressed a wish not to be growing up, which is funny because, as my friend Kyle says, "He was never a baby." He was born trying to keep up with his siblings, like every youngest.

I wasn't sentimental about my birthdays at his age. I checked them off like Tom Hanks marking the passage of time on his cave wall in "Castaway". I'm still in some kind of delusional state of believing with all my heart that "the best is yet to be" as it relates to me. (It better be. I've got a lot of room to grow.)

But oh, I love these days with the kids. I don't want them to ever end. Sometimes I get a frantic feeling about the passing of this summertime of their childhood, that I ought to be stashing away time somehow, making maximum use of it. Taking more pictures, stuffing more wisdom into their heads, kissing them more. And also feeling a pang of guilt for enjoying the times when my house is kid-free and aaah...clean.

Or I could just sit next to them like I did last night, laughing at the seagulls on tv nomming on swarms of insects. Opine about where's the best place to be buried (Death Valley) and what's the most regal age to be (sixty).

Just notice. Notice and enjoy.


The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

(c) 1990 by Mary Oliver