I’m in my parents’ kitchen in Nashville, dropping crumbs of chocolate chip cookie into my baby son’s mouth and monitoring the doneness of some pasta boiling on the stove. I have begun a wedding post, which sits safely in my drafts folder, but I won’t be publishing it til I have some pictures to include. I want to tell it properly, and I am not typing in conditions that allow for precision in my writing. (I.e., Liam is whining my ear off).
My oldest just stumbled, blinking, into the light of the kitchen, still half asleep from his afternoon nap. My back is twinging painfully, because I looked one millimeter too far to the left or wore a bracelet that is an ounce too heavy or flipped my hair over the wrong shoulder or some other ridiculously minute and unpredictable reason. I wonder if it would be better to just be in constant dull pain, or if I should be happy that for most minutes of the day I can almost forget I have a broken back, except those impossible-to-gauge instances when I’m blindsided by a wallop of a pinch that leads to a massive lower-back Charley horse. Insert humongous sigh for my hugely difficult terrible life, oy vey.
We’re about to eat – summer sweet corn and cucumbers and tomatoes from my father’s garden, with chicken sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. Liam is getting bites of cookie from his Grandpa Doc, too. Jack has chocolate smeared all over his upper lip. Their dad is enjoying a few minutes of quiet time upstairs, watching baseball on the big screen HD tv. Back pain aside, it’s been a lovely summer day in Tennessee.