I Not.

As you know, I haven't been quite at the top of my game this week. Today involved handfuls of impatience and leaving the house with both my pants (thankfully yoga pants -- if they were jeans, we'd know I'm really in trouble) and my fleece inside out. Eden's new phrase that kicked in mid-morning is "I not." As in, Eden, would you like an orange. I NOT. or Eden let's put your boots on. I NOT. or It's time for dinner, Eden. I NOT. or Let's hold hands as we cross the street. I NOT.

(Fortunately for her, she also walked around all day wearing green frog-face rain boots and -- in between "I not"'s -- smiling, saying in the tiniest high voice, "woooooook, I have boots").

I drove the kids 30 minutes south to a beach I never go to -- seemed important to change locations all together. A runoff spout cut a deep "river" through the beach and the seagulls settled and resettled in a cloud. The kids loved it. I tried to climb behind my sunglasses and journal to work out some kinks in the glaring sun, but Eden, of course, kept finding me to show that she was poking the sand with a stick or walking with a shovelful of sand.

I had brought one of Jane Kenyon's poetry books with me that I never read, and once we were resettled onto the playground, I opened it to the middle. This is the poem that met me, which was a good word spoken into the day:

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks


I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years....

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me....

I am the food on the prisoner's plate....

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills...

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden...

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge...

I am the heart contracted by joy...
the longest hair, white
before the rest....

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow....

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit....

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name....