Wistful

The start of a rainstorm makes me melancholy and wistful. The solid stretch of gray cloud presses down on my heart. The first drops bouncing off my windshield make me long for something other than my minivan full of children, headed for the library to pass another cold, wet morning. A gallop up a steep hill to a small copse of trees. Stinging hail pelts our faces, mine all but covered by my poncho hood as I trust my pony to find shelter from the storm. A tropical storm blowing in off of the Pacific. First the wind, only, whipping my hair into my eyes. It antagonizes the surf that pounds the rocks below me into a frenzy, announcing the deluge that is visible a mile or so off shore. I count the waterspouts that snake from gray-black clouds to gray-green ocean and laugh at the power.

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I marked it like you told me. We lay together, curled perfectly side by side in the wan, underwater light of a February morning and nursed for the last time. I stroked his soft, red hair and tried to focus on the pull, the little chugging swallows, but my mind kept drifting. Is this done? Should I feel donefully doner somehow? Or will I always feel wistful for these growing, aching, joyful, painful baby days? I fear it's the latter. I'm a yearner. I tend to barrel, happy and fast-moving and sure through my days and then pause and gaze back, stunned and sad that the climb is over.

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Another dank morning and we dance in a train in the wet-rock cold basement. They are so cute my heart hurts, but my camera is broken because I dropped it on the pavement in Mexico. The way that warmth kisses your cheek and massages your shoulders seems like a myth now. We dance past the train set and the wall with the hammer marks and the baby propped up by pillows in the corner of the couch. I leopard crouch across the room toward Nate and he bounces in anticipation, mouth open and hands pounding the pillow in his lap. He's wearing a Polo onsie, red with dark blue preppy stripes that I bought for Gee back when Polo didn't seem so ridiculous for our only child. What a different mother I am now.

Cue holds my hands behind my back and Ess holds his waist and Gee holds her waist. Laughing, we dance past the four bulletin boards hung on the wall in a careful rectangle that I stained so lovingly to match the room the summer before Ess and O came home in between nursing my one little red-headed boy. Our newest red-headed child smiles his wide two-toothed smile. Past the two-year-old finger paintings I can't bear to take down and the carefully decorated dinosaurs from preschool. Past the barn toy box my grandfather made for me. Past the corner cabinet Matt made a lifetime ago when we dreamed up projects to fill our free time.

There. Maybe I'm glad I didn't have a camera. What will make me more wistful when I'm eighty-four and I pass a wet, gray afternoon reliving the past? The pictures or the words?

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I'm thirty-seven on Sunday. I'm on the edge of moving past so many things. There's so much to do after all of this. I want to stand on my last continent. I want C&G to drag me around Uganda and mock me when I sob at the size of the spiders. I want to work again. I want another baby, a little. But I'm thirty-seven, not twenty-eight, and I'm beginning to understand that I always will. A little. At some point, you have to let it fade into the past.