Remembering

I have no photos from today but I found this one on my phone from a long time ago and it bears repeating. Those three bebes. 

Facebook gave me a memory from five years ago the other day that I reposted there because it makes my heart just melt. 

Maggie and August cutting up at the Costco. That first picture with their little feetsies just breaks me. And the look on their faces- as if they're getting away with something absolutely wicked and wild. Levon was just a tiny thing and was in the cart in his covered-up carrier, not yet the grinning imp he would soon become that you see in the first picture.  

It is the most cliched thing in the world to say but goddamn it- they grow up so fast! Now they're reading and writing and doing arithmetic and beating me at gin rummy and they're all the boss of me. 

Lord. How does this happen? 

It's been a quiet day here in Lloyd. Cold. We slept warm though, me with my duck and a cat. Maurice has slept with us two nights in a row now, laying right by my side and not moving all night. Of course if I move she tells me in no uncertain terms that this is not acceptable behavior but I just ignore her and we both go back to sleep. How she and Jack have made this agreement on the change in sleeping arrangements is another cat mystery to me.

Mr. Moon did indeed get up and go duck hunting at 4:30 a.m. He called me a little after ten to ask if he could bring me breakfast from the restaurant where the men had gone after hunting. He's sweet like that. But I was already making my own Sunday breakfast so thanked him kindly and told him I was fine. I've learned to make the fastest easiest biscuits in the world. Well, except for the kind that come out of the pop tube. The good thing about biscuits is that you can cut down the amount of ingredients to whatever you want for however many servings you want. If you're making biscuits for a crowd, you might want to use three cups of flour but if you're making them for one, you can use half a cup of flour. And then I bake them (or it) in the airfryer/toaster oven and they only take about ten minutes. They rise and brown and are lovely. So I baked myself two biscuits and cooked some bacon and heated up leftover grits from last night's fish supper and cooked one egg and it was perfect. It's held me all day. 

Mr. Moon has been doing his usual post-duck-hunting thing which is to snooze in his chair in-between reading the newspaper. He deserves this time. He worked so many hours for so many years and was as involved in his family as he could have possibly been all the while. I look back on those years when the kids were young and his business was young and I can't imagine how we did it. How we survived intact. And yet we did and here we are, in our golden years which are not nearly as golden as one would think they'd be and thank god we have all this practice in surviving despite hard things because there are a million hard things about getting older. I guess the miracle is that we still make each other laugh, we are still kind to each other, we still accept each other as we are, we still have a lot of sweetness and even passion, and we still respect each other. 

Mostly. 

For whatever reason, I've been having dreams about my very first true love. I am not going to denigrate how kids feel about that first relationship because it's as real as rain. It may be fueled by hormones and an incredibly innocent and misunderstood definition of love, but no one forgets it. And some of the longest and best relationships I know of started in Jr. high or high school, were first loves and now fifty years or so later- obviously last loves. 
Obviously I am not still with my first real sweetheart and I haven't really thought of him for years. But I can remember thinking that we would marry and live in a little stucco and tile-roofed house that I loved in Winter Haven. We had two friends who married very young because she was pregnant and their life in a tiny apartment seemed idyllic. Which of course, it wasn't, and they did not stay together for very long. But I so longed to live in a house that was truly a home where I was loved and could love freely. I desperately needed an escape. I think that many, many women get married for that very same reason. 
Thankfully, I did not get pregnant, I did not marry that boy. He was a bit insane, I think, but so was I. I escaped by going to college in Denver, Colorado and that did not work out well but somehow it all ended up with me here, meeting Glen Moon.

So why these dreams now? 
Oh, who knows? The brain giving me memories like Facebook does, perhaps. 

"Here. Remember this?"
Oh. Yes. Yes I do, now that I think about it, now that you've reminded me.  

But unlike FB memories, I have no longing to go back to that time except for perhaps the pure innocence and wonder at what it felt like to be in love and that close to another human being. 

And surely, that's enough of that.

Love...Ms. Moon