Space

But maybe this is all mood is, rising grief and its ebb then a winter chickadee on the sand cherry tree. I can write about my dog leaping over a puddle (darling! darling!) but not about my children. Such a terrible affection. They lived in my body and then they didn’t. They rubbed my earlobes and then they didn’t. It is entire or it is abject. I am weary of not being young anymore.

And so my dog jumps over the puddle like a tiny gazelle, like a white-tailed deer bounding across a paved road in the backcountry, except she is neither antelope nor cervine. Later the dog will take her place at the foot of my bed and I might think again about my children pressed against me in sleep when all I wanted was a little freedom, a little space of my own.