What Is Life If Not A School Of Love?

What, what, what? Owen is coming in an hour and he'll be here all day and then tonight is the Opera House, making plates of food, serving plates of food, picking up plates cleaned of food, drying those plates and stacking them up.
More water? I'll ask. Can I take this? I'll ask.

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.

Mr. Moon is coming tonight as well and he will help Colin bar tend. Two tall men (one too-tall, almost) wearing white shirts and bow ties and I think I might pass out from the darlingness of that picture. I will take my camera.

But here's what I'm thinking of this morning before the baby boy gets here, before I even begin to think about what to wear tonight- I'm thinking of thirty-two years ago and May was in the process of being born. She was born on the 24th and I had labored all day on the 23rd and my water had broken on the 22nd but on the 21st, I knew she was near.
All those years ago and I have the image in my head of wet thighs, my own, the process already slowly begun and I was 23-years old myself and I thought I was grown up and I guess I was, having already had a baby and then a miscarriage and now, my body was about to deliver this one into the heat of late May and I remember that the flowers I'd planted had already started blooming. Zinnias, I think.
That day, thirty-two years ago today and I was ready, I was waiting. A lady-in-waiting, a mother already and to be again. We lived in a trailer whose dimensions were ten feet by fifty feet and there was red carpet on the floor and I wore hippie skirts and tended a garden and my belly was swollen with that girl and Hank was my world, he already had claimed my heart, captured my soul and I worried so that I wouldn't be able to love another the way I loved him but of course, I learned different when May was born. I learned about love that day.
The midwives were ready, my husband was ready, it was hot. Did I mention it was hot? Oh. It was hot.

Snap! Back to here and now and my grandchild is coming. I imagine his mother is getting ready for work and changing his diaper and picking out something for him to wear and saying, "You're going to see your crazy chicken grandmother now let me put your shirt on!"
Owen who taught me about love again.
Each of my children brought their own lesson of love to me and so has this grandson.
And my husbands, both of them, have taught me about love. The one I had and had to divorce, the one I have and who is my partner-in-love and we teach each other about love over and over and over again.
And those women who midwifed me taught me about love and my friends do too, they teach me every day about love and maybe, just maybe, this whole life has been a school of love.
A school of love. Think about that.
I can't even begin to verbalize what I think love is. There is this kind and there is that kind and all I can do is open my heart or, rather, let it be open, and even the frogs which are for some reason croaking right now, the little wren that flies back to her nest, the rooster crowing in the yard, the lilies opening by the pump house, the way the trees give the light meaning and reason as they catch it and shine, filtering it and layering it, the stillness of this day because it is going to be so hot- all of it has something to do with teaching me love.
All these teachers and yet, I am certain I do not know even the merest bit of what it all really means. I always say I believe in two things- love and light- and I am not sure even what that means.
But I believe it's true.

May was born to me just as it was getting light and I reached for her and held her to me and my heart burst again with love.

I don't think I can add much more to that.

Thank-you for being part of my school of love. Every one of you who comes here and every one of you who writes about your own life, showing me over and over and over again what love can be and how the light falls and does not fall for you.

Happy Friday, y'all.
Love....Ms. Moon