Elspeth lies on the couch next to me, her eyes heavy with sleep and fever. I picked her up early from school today and she's been sacked out the couch ever since. On the way home I knew her sickness couldn't be too desperate since she suggested that the thing that would make her feel better the fastest would be a cheeseburger from McDonalds. But she genuinely has a fever, and though she chowed two bowls of mac 'n cheese and four Tylenols, she's still warm and sleepy. Her feet are nestled behind my back and her hair, swept off her face, is tinged with gold.

Outside it's beautiful and sunny; the bare redbud trees gleam in the late afternoon. Elspeth keeps saying, "You're the nicest mama in the world. There couldn't be a nicer mommy than you. Can I kiss your forehead since I'm sick?"

I've been a parent for over ten years now. The other night Merry looked up at me from her pillow and said: "I'm getting really old. In only eight years I'll be gone at college." What?

Tired of TV, we're listening to some old hymns. . .Oh, Love, that will not let me go. . .This particular rendition, gospel meets soul, is over-the-top silly ("The music, not the words, sound like something that would be on the Cosby Show," Merry commented) but the words themselves, the knowledge that I am held tenaciously by love, fill me with gratitude.

There are many things I love being about a parent, but the quiet moments are often my favorite, when one of the children slows down--and I slow down--to enter these quiet, hallowed moments when time is nothing but a suggestion somewhere else in a busy world, when the very air is charged with tenderness.