Words

Words. Sometimes they fail me. Sometimes I post trivia, I swipe videos from Youtube, I photograph cupcakes and cookies, because I need the light relief. April and May, the months of spring--they’ve brought lightning too. Two grandmothers passing away after long, well-lived lives. Remarkable women; but when was being a grandmother or a mother anything less than remarkable? When is that profound decision to bring life into the world, to start a new branch in your section of the human tree, ever anything less than insanely brave? (Or breathtakingly foolhardy, as I sometimes think.)

Continuity. Moving forward. We make that decision every day. Someone who is like a sister to me recently had a medical diagnosis that made this a very real issue, because as it turned out her condition would be immensely alleviated by having a child. A solution with its own complication.

New generations. Four kids, each different, each a wonderful sapling. Vicky’s eight-year-old AJ, precociously articulate. Lee’s sturdy Geoff, fairly vibrating with mischief. Betchie’s comic Jill, who likes more than anything to make faces. And my goddaughter, Erika, growing up enfolding everyone in her big-sister embrace, and yet the most fragile of them all.

What do you do when your cup runneth over with love for these creatures, whom you had never imagined could exist?

A friend's child celebrates his first birthday. He is beautiful too, this boy. Soft, plump, a ball of tenderness, lavish with his smiles.

Life overflows. I am enmeshed in ties of blood and connections. Parents, sisters, brother. Uncles, aunts. Cousins and cousins’ children. Lost grandparents. Carriers of pieces of my own genetic code. Friends, comrades, neighbors. Strangers. All builders of my social DNA. I am caught in a web of need and loss, love and animosity (and insecurity, and pigheadedness, vanity, pettiness). But it is all to be cherished. I am grateful to life, in all its events. Even when it drives me inchoate or leaves me speaking in code.