Stuck

There are a number of swirling emotions in our home right now, which is normal for the second week of March. "When is it going to stop being wintertime?" Z. asks, again. She had been asking this once a day for a couple of weeks, the past few days representing a freakish respite from snow and whithering cold.

"It will stop being winter next Tuesday," I tell her, "that's the first day of spring." But I also warn her, "it will still be cold."

Seasons hold meaning to all living things, the calendar only belongs to us. And so it is with no amount of real significance to anyone except us (the personal us this time, not the all-inclusive us) that March 20 falls on a Tuesday, for the first time since 2001.

Monday was the routine check-up, Tuesday was his birthday.

Two days ago I spent the afternoon with Number 3. The Boy. The One Who Lived, and continues to do so despite own mutual attempts to smash his head to pieces (not to mention a particularly grisly dream I had the other night which I won't go into here.)

We were in the backyard, he wanted to play with the rakes, so we were scraping up all the leaves from the Magnolia which I missed last fall. We also took up a lot of dead grass.

I have lived in the same house since 1993. I only met the backyard in 2001. We cancelled the lawn service, primarily as a cost-cutting measure, but it put me back there, with a new, manual lawn-mower. Toni worked in the garden, we got a bench, I pulled weeds, it was part of the plan, whatever it took to take control of something, anything.

And though I had this hot little toddler in my hands, helping him put the ball in the basket (over and over and over again) the rich smell of rotten grass, the dust from the garage, the sun on my head, the breeze, it was all 2001, all over again.