I think it was when we were walking the trail in the field, when I was in labor with Beatrice, and Jeremy and I had a brief conversation about gardens and planting and growth and fruit. Namely, about the timing of the harvest of some plants versus others.
Our garden last year had been brief and exciting. We plowed, we tilled, we planted, we watched eagerly. Then plants sprang up, the fruit grew, and the harvest was bountiful. All of this happened in the span of a handful of months.
Five months for Darling Beatrice, the sweetest baby at Janderhil. (She is also the only baby, but that is neither here nor there.)
Miss Beada turned four months on the fourth of August.
If she knew how tardy this update is, she would most assuredly growl at me. She’s a most accomplished growler, brazenly grumbling at her hands (invariably clenched during this exercise) or at her feet (she’s just realized they’re down there) or at the doctor at her four-month checkup (“Is she growling??” The doctor asked, and I nodded.) I am not sure why she does it. It is probably because she can.
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Three years ago, while Jeremy was still in Georgia getting our house together to sell and I was living here alone with four children, I started reading the Bible to the kids over breakfast.
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I am drowning, I wrote to myself in my journal. No, that’s not right. I’m being bricked in. It was a few weeks after Beatrice was born. I was already back in the swing of things–I had been since her second week. Schooling, housekeeping, childrearing, everything. I had sent a text a friend saying I felt “thin”, like Bilbo with the ring. To another, I confessed, Number Six may be the one that does me in.
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