She will just ramble on. . . .

It's a very quiet MLK day here at Wazoo, though I just heard Merry cackle. Yes, cackle is the right word. It's supposed to be quiet time--Bea just looked outside and said, "It's very dark. It must be time to go to bed." The sky is a heavy white, a reflection of the snowy ground, though it's warming for evening rain.

Merry has saved her weekend homework until now and should be bent studiously over her tablet and book but Catherine is upstairs, too, and concentration is unlikely. Catherine is such a part of our family now that I no longer adjust my thought to fill four cups with water or ask four girls to scatter to tasks. I no longer "set an extra place" for Catherine but it is as if I have a fourth "sometimes" daughter.

It's been a short three or four months since Nancy died, but oddly it seems like much longer. In a way, death is like a boulder in a river; the river continues rushing on but there's new texture to it, an awareness of the way the rock has changed the course of the water. And, at least in this life, it's immovable. It will always be there and though everyone sees it, it is not often talked of. The first week I spent with Catherine after her mother passed away, I noticed that I did not speak of Nancy. At the end of the week, I felt convicted of the wrongness of this. Now I speak of Nancy freely with Catherine--when I see something that reminds me of her mother, I say so. When I remember something her mother loved, I tell Catherine. She must have many stories of her mother, and with these stories she will build a secret room of riches for herself. She'll need it--we all need secret rooms.

Catherine speaks easily and matter-of-factly about her mother, in the healthy, natural way that children have, or should have. It is only we adults, tied up so tightly by our own fears, who must adjust and choose to be natural instead of awkward.

I often think that we will someday realize that time is a flexible, boneless thing that wraps us now but will later be thrown from our shoulders like an old coat. It seems like such a rigid thing now--it pins us, storms at us, makes us dizzy and sad--but someday we'll find it to be a friendly, dynamic thing, with which we can play and relate and even laugh at. At least this is what I trust to be true, and it seems so much more obvious now that my friend has died, my children are growing quickly, and winter is here again, though the lilacs are already tightly budded. What if they were to bloom this afternoon and the air around them warmed until the grass went green and their corner of the garden was full of spring? Something like this happens in Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant." The North Wind and Frost punish the giant for being selfish, but one day the giant smells spring blowing in the window. When he looks outside, "He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads." You can read the whole story, which begins with promise but ends by being unfortunately didactic, HERE.

(Please don't try to stick your children in icy trees to see if sudden thaw will occur.)