A Spring Night

The rain has settled in for the week and more than anything, I think it has brought our family some well needed rush-lessness.  It hasn't kept us indoors necessarily.  In fact a lot of the rain has come at night while we are all sleeping.  But it leaves the world too wet for baseball practices and games, so instead of hurrying through homework, cramming in dinner and getting whoever needs to be at baseball to baseball, we finish up dinner and the kids throw balls of all sorts among themselves and the neighborhood kids in our backyard.

Tonight I had the back screen door open while I was doing the dishes and I could hear the yelling and commotion of three or four different games going on at once, in and through each other.  I could see #6 toddling precariously between golf balls, baseballs and footballs up and down the grassy little hill that goes up to the woods behind our house.  With the cool breeze sneaking through the mesh of the door and taking a left to meet me in the kitchen, things felt just about exactly, chaotically, right.

...And then I heard a howl coming from #5 whose head, I later found out, had gotten in the way of a golf ball thrown by the 6 year-old next door neighbor.  #1 yelled out, "I'm going to kill you!" to the next door neighbor while hugging his screaming brother and I came to the door and said, "#1 you apologize to the next door neighbor ahora!"  And denials and justifications and lectures and tears and descriptions of pains and all sorts of anger from the Gods came pouring upon us all.

Then Dad came downstairs and said, "Everyone come inside and go get showered," and the backyard was left in utter silence, in a quiet, green innocence, in a dampened, spring peacefulness.