I’m searching for a pen among the sea of my cluttered desk — a teething ring, a bent paper clip, a rogue bracelet, an empty granola wrapper, a box of photos, an open barette, a baby monitor, a stapler. These are a few of the many items cluttering the desk. I need something to write with — something to record this moment as you lay in my arms, cradled in the nook of my left arm nest, tucked against my beating heart — so big, so warm, so welcome to this love. Your mouth is just the tiniest bit ajar, now it’s closed. Just like that you shift — my observation so keen and acute, changes and you are in another moment — another plane of time.
Photo by Megan Oteri Copyright 2011
Now, as the Dogwood trees bloom their white white cottony velvet petals, just two weeks later, you are pulling up, thinking about walking, manipulating the mechanics of it in your beautiful mind filled with so many new things that have opened up into your world and laid a carpet before you of excitement and curiosity. I watch you, bewildered and provide a safe lighthouse for you to look back on and see. Always I will offer you that light, that magnification of your greatness out at sea.
As I watch you, so peacefully asleep. frozen in this sliver of time, I hold onto you and savor it — savor it — savor it, because as cliché as it is — it goes by too damn fast. But this — this moment — it’s crystalized and I feel it so intensely as if a thousand Monarch butterflies have fluttered in my heart. Staring and bewildered by the beauty — I look in sweet swift glance as it passes by.
