not much is settled

The screen door is open, because fall in Ohio is perfect, and the wind blows off the counter all the scraps of paper with notes about what needs to be done. Life is a house of cards here, at its foundation the sort of calendar that stares back at me with bloodshot eyes. I used to think Andy was selective about coffee but he is temporarily working three jobs and I think he might drink caffeinated gasoline. I wake up feeling like my stomach has arrived at a carnival and is poised at the top of a plunge ride. In short, lots of things are simmering and not much is settled. 

Still we are leaning into every little delight:

Tucker thanks us a thousand times or two for proofreading his social commentary essay, stays after school to work in the Robotics room, admires the beautiful quilt that RoRo has lovingly made for him. There are suddenly hours he's still out and about after I'd like to be in bed. He is busy with marching band and football Friday nights, and I marvel at the way his here and now intersects with our there and then. 

Tolliver's days are full from dawn to dusk with baseball and music lessons and birthday parties with way more sugar than the lord may have intended. No longer his apple slicer, I've become an occasional confidant, daily doses of wobbly middle school uncertainty. It feels like, for both of us, his ratio and proportion review takes three million years and maybe forever to complete and I know it will all be over tomorrow and he'll be gone for good. I have a nose-stinging, lump in my throat sensation just thinking about it.

The back door requests for candy to fill homemade piñatas turn to Sharpie permission so surgical gloves can become finger puppets. It is literally one craft after another for Hank, nonstop. I watch his posse mix milk and marshmallows to create invisibility potions and all the girls I ever was flash past, a whole childhood held up to the light like paper dolls. I for sure want to file these memories of him in a shoebox in my brain.

When I stop to catch my breath I sense so many sacred geometries, time folding back on itself, lives touching in straight stitches and generations connected by some cosmic chord. For all the cracks in my calendar, for all the saxophone squawks and the uncapped glue sticks, for all the to-dos that are lost in the breeze, it is abundantly clear there are an equal number of lines spiraling out to the most important things.