When I came in late from eating pie (Happy Pi Day!) with some good women tonight, I ran upstairs to say goodnight to the restless girls and noticed Beatrix's neck was sunburned. I hate to celebrate a sunburn, but it is a the mark of one unbelievably gorgeous, summery day, with the daffodils waving like gospel singers and the grass busting out so green it's almost bad taste and the robins taking back the neighborhood. It was THAT sort of March day, the kind of day that makes you want to forget all your troubles and fly off into the lonely white cloud in the azure sky.

Though I did not fly, I did walk quite a bit and sat in the sun and continued with the forever job of tidying the winter-weary yard. I pulled on Martin's thick hide gloves and went at the piles of nasty thorns, trying to wrestle them into big garbage bags (a tricky task). Soon after the buses pulled through the the streets, Roberto, Nancy's middle son, arrived in our driveway on his bike. Roberto, middle-school, big-talker, sweetly handsome young man (originally from Guatemala, with a sweep of dark hair, big, brown eyes, a bit shorter than many of his peers), is a good story-teller and is extraordinarily skilled with wee kids. And my two little girls love him. They've both grown up with him, calling him either "Berto" or "Bobo." One night two-year old Bea prayed for "Uncle Berto," which Merry and Catherine thought was hilarious. Elspeth and Bea love to torture him in a good-natured way, pulling on his legs and slugging him once and a while (this is not encouraged by their mother, by the way.)

This afternoon he somewhat awkwardly hung out with me for a few minutes while I shoved rose branches into a trashcan. He responded politely to my stock questions--How was school today? Do you have testing this week? That means no homework, right? Etc. (How boring I must be, just like the grown-ups I remember from my childhood; I'd answer with a smile, wishing they would ask about something other than school. . .and mostly they never did). After a genial interlude, Roberto disappeared down the hill and the next thing I knew, he was hitting around a plastic baseball with Elspeth. I looked up again and he was pitching to her, slowly and patiently. And then Elspeth gathered some black walnuts from our big tree and began throwing them to Roberto, who knocked them to kingdom come, down our chimney and off our roof.

"Home run!" I heard Elspeth yell, and then to me up the hill, "Mommy! Roberto's GOOD!"

I gazed down at them in the sea of emerald grass, six-year old Elspeth (often a handful) and Roberto (often discouraged by his lack of ease with sports), both middle children, and they seemed to be glowing like suns. I could feel the warmth.

John, Roberto's father, had told me a few days ago that Roberto had come home from playing baseball at a friend's house discouraged and in a bad mood. Today Roberto admitted to me he can't hit a baseball. But he could sure hit those walnuts Elspeth was pitching to him--boy, was he slugging them. And to Elspeth down in the field by our creek, Roberto was Babe Ruth.

It struck me: we all should be so adored. Adoration is wonderful. When we know it from another person we love, adoration transforms us, helps us come closer to understanding who we really are--worthy of celebration. And when we see it in the pure, loving adoration of another, and it moves us to strive to be more generous givers.

"Well, I think I'll just come back tomorrow," Roberto told me a few hours later, after he had hung out in the garden, eating graham crackers distributed by Beatrix, who warned him "not to get a tummyache" and then on the porch with Elspeth as she cut out a paper crown.

"That would be wonderful," I smiled. "You're really good with the kids, Roberto."

He shrugged a little. "It seems like you could use someone to play with them," he said. And as he inched toward the door, he added, "I'll just come over after school."

"You can come over any time," I said.

"I told Elspeth I'd bring my aluminum bat."

I remember what my dear childhood friend told me when she fell in love with the man she will marry this summer. Her eyes were full of a new place, as if she'd just travelled to the most beautiful country she had never known existed. "It feels so good to be loved like that," she said. "I didn't know how good it would be."

We all deserve to be adored, not in a sentimental silly way that clouds our faults and coats us with sugar, but in a real way, a way that strips off our veils and shows us who we really are, and we realize that we are, after all, worthy of being loved sacrificially. Perhaps the adoration that I silently celebrated this afternoon is a glimpse of the eternal, where we will be at last truly joyful without reservation, where we will love without having to draw back, where we will accept the love that has always been waiting for us, that has surrounded us from our birth.