Samuel will be twelve-years-old this coming Monday.
How did this happen?
How is it that in a few short weeks I will no longer have any children in elementary school and I am expecting my first grandbaby?
People ask – which daughter is pregnant? They almost always think Emma, which makes her sort of laugh, but no. It is the first daughter I raised, Beyunca, who is pregnant. She is thirty-one, prime baby time, and very pleased to be bringing life to the world. She is due in December. We are using this time to continue recreating our relationship.
Like much of my life, it is not a conventional one.
The one constant, though – for you and for me – is we will each gain so much when we learn to hold this day as the treasure it is. This day – this moment – this right here under our noses is our best day yet.
Embracing this thought will help us to understand the purest forms of gratitude and awaken such an abundant attitude, the sadness of a little boy becoming a young man will turn into a swelling pride in the young man he is becoming.
He wants adobe aftereffects for his birthday – the movie making program – because he keeps honing his skills as a video maker. He does so many things I could never figure out.
Today Emma is celebrating her first full day at school with no braces by wearing makeup she put on herself and an adorable outfit. She is truly coming into her own. The conversations we have been having lately would be mind-boggling if I didn’t know what a miracle that young woman is, just in being herself.
I even grieved a bit to learn Katherine is not going to be home this Summer after all. She is off to either Berkeley (my fingers are crossed and re-crossed!) or Washington, DC. I have been focusing not on my own selfish desire to hold her a little bit longer, but on holding her growing independence as she reaches into the adulthood she has been earning ever since she arrived on the Smith College campus nearly three years ago.
The mulberries are crashing off the tree today, firm and tight. Instead of splattering on my neighbor’s cars, they bounce off.
My yard looks like mulberry stew.
I am holding this moment by looking up recipes that include mulberries. Would you believe I’ve been in this house with this tree for twenty-two years and never gleaned the fruit to create anything edible?
I wasn’t ready then, I suppose, for the full abundance this tree has offered me season after season after season.
There is a whole other story there.
I’ll leave that for another day, another moment, another time of writing life.
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© 2013 Julie Jordan Scott