Pleasantries

Can I take a little moment to testify that a husband is a really useful thing?  Man, they're just so darned handy.  A Dad isn't a bad thing to have around either, I'm sure I could get my kids to back me up on that one.  We might be in our keenest state of missing Spouse-the-Gone right now.  But don't fret for us, he should be Spouse-the-Here in not too long at all.  In fact what I and the tribe are probably all a little tangled up in feeling is the half-pleasant, half-terrible I-can't-waits.  It will be rad to be with the fellow again.

I find lately, that when I get stretched out to what feels like my nether ends - when my brain is about rubbed through and I'm walking on the bare bones of my feet - something pleasant surprises me.

A few days ago at bedtime when I was getting this one and that one in their pajamas and telling the other one to stop trying to kill herself by jumping off of her brother's bed with her over-sized toothbrush in her mouth, I took a quick step out onto the back porch to throw away a diaper.  In the moment that I did that I saw my neighbor's brown plank fence with a line of green tree-tops behind it.  Over the green was a thick smudge of golden pink like it was pulled across the canvas on someone's thumb whose upper thumb-hairs were covered more in the golden than the pink.  Above the golden was just a little line of white to set things off and then the sky finished itself in a mellow blue that deepened into a blackish purple .  And I thought, "The world is so darned pretty.  All the time it is being pretty.  Even when I'm running around about five minutes behind peace and order, the world keeps going on being pretty."  And I felt much better.

Then one morning after doing the breakfast hustle and the frantic slam-jamming of CK into his school clothes topped by his back-pack, the CK and I found ourselves distracted by hummingbirds while standing in our driveway waiting for the school bus to come up the street.  Three hummingbirds bizzed and buzzed up, down and all around our porch.  Then one little green guy zipped toward us, stopped with an intense vibration of wings right between us, looked at us with his long pin-like beak precisely motionless, his dark eyes so calm you'd think he would have been languidly sipping sweet tea, then, wha-zam, he was a black dart fifty feet away.  That hummingbird stretched a quarter of a second into about three minutes.  It was surprising and stunning, kind of like a special little prize - a pretty, little something for the too rushed CK and I to enjoy before our morning whooshed away from us.

But my favorite pleasant surprise of the week came just two days ago when the troops were all in the mini-van with me at the helm and a friend of the CK's stuffed between the CK and Sidekick's booster seats to the point that his shoulders were forced inward.  My mind was going over what had been done at home and what was left to do and how the "what was left to do" would be accomplished with an extra body in the place, when I picked up the conversation happening in the back of the vehicle.

CK said as we pulled up to a red light, "Look, a dead snake in the road!"  I looked over and saw a skinny piece of black rubber that had come off of a car.

"That sure looks like a snake, but I think it's a part of a car that came off," I said.

"No," CK's friend disavowed, "it goes long and then coils all around.  That's got to be a dead snake."

Unlike his friend, CK must have seen that what I was saying was true, but in order to reclaim some of the glory that comes with dead-snake-seeing, he said, "Well, on Sunday when we were driving to church we saw a dead snake.  A real, live, dead snake."

Thank goodness for pleasant little surprises.