Wild Terrain

This time of year often feels like it comes barreling at me through the closed brown doors, staring me down in a intense, saucer-eyed. steel-glazed stare like the crazed bird in a cuckoo clock. It’s time, he says. It’s nearly spring and this season is wrapping and closing. Your oldest child and your partner, your longest running friend and love just celebrated birthdays. Another year has graced us with its presence, leaving in its wake the rippled effects of living and parenting and priming the ground ahead, guiding us through this unknown, somewhat haggard terrain. There are branches in the road and cement sidewalks are cracked and filled with the runoff from the storms we’ve weathered, flowers blooming in between because though this path has been textured with conditions, the soil we built upon is strong and we are resistant.

I learned the colors of the rainbow at a very early age.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

I don’t remember much from that time of my life, but I remember loving those rainbows that would appear just after a good downpour, kissing the flat land of our suburban Ohio neighborhood. I keep seeing rainbows lately, and I am still taken aback by their beauty and lately their significance. Our life has been incredibly full lately, and i’m trying to accept that this is our normal with two blossoming careers and four beautiful and rapidly growing and changing children.

Jack and Beau had their 3 and 8 year well visit last week. I jotted down their weights, heights and percentiles while watching them beam with pride at their growth and accomplishment.  These visits always feel a little like parenthood performance reviews (in the best way, really) and I always leave feeling both jarred by the torment from their inoculations and emotional about the year that has passed so quickly.

We baptized Evangeline that Sunday in our beautiful little mountain church, surrounded by family and loved ones, our hearts and lives clearly bursting at the seams.

Despite this life barreling down a weathered and wild terrain, it’s certainly laced in love and gratitude, blessings all around.