A Metaphor for Motherhood and Moving

I was standing right next to this great man the day he told a pair of new parents, "If you feel like your world has been turned upside down it's because it has been". In the last three years this statement has come to mind more oft' than not because it's so darn true. Things I once thought of as important are no longer. Priorities have been shuffled. Satchel is on the top and I'm on the bottom seeing the world from a whole new, and sometimes dizzying, perspective.

I awoke in the middle of the night because my mental clip board would not stop tallying the things I still have to do. As I laid there trying hard not to think about the to-do list that roused me from slumber a storm, that my weather-buff husband predicted, made it's debut on cue. I'm certain that he was smirking in his sleep. I watched the tree tops above us sway while the rain pelted the house. The rains in the south are voluptuous rains, not at all like the sleek droplets in the north. Northern raindrops are often tamed by an umbrella. Southern raindrops make a mockery of that invention. They are the size of grapes....heavy, wet and VERY cold.

It was raining when we returned from our former flat yesterday where we retrieved some of the plants from our former garden. Only two of the Foxgloves that I planted last year had the courage to plant roots in the clay-like soil and I waited all year for these beauties to grow. Sadly, one broke in the car....the one that was blooming. Robert took Satch inside to make him dinner while I transplanted our flora in the rain. "This isn't the real rain", Robert warned, "the real storm will be here sometime in the middle of the night".

I laid there listening to the rain and thought about the little bird I rescued that afternoon and was thankful that I found it before the rains came as it would have surely drowned. I was planting pumpkins in the backyard when I heard Satch giggling behind me, "a birdie...a birdie", and I rather impatiently replied, "there's no birdie down there". "A birdie!", he persisted so I walked over to the basement window well and below the grate was a little bird. I apologized and thanked him for telling me. I lifted off the grate, jumped into the hole and reached for the bird. It opened it's mouth wide when I caught it and I thought it must be either very young or very hungry, but before I could ask Satch to find a worm, it jumped out of my hands and took off into the woods. I whacked my head on the bottom of the window climbing out of the hole and could not find the bird.

I fell back asleep for a short spell before waking again. I padded downstairs bleary-eyed, poured myself a mug of hot organic coffee and tried to think of which item I could scratch off my to-do list without waking Satch. Then I spotted a large wild rabbit eating clover in our front yard and decided to watch it instead. Last week I removed all the weeds, but left the clover with the hope of seeing some rabbits. The site of that brown bunny hopping and nibbling made me forget how tired I was. I named it "Thethuthinnang" and went back to my topsy-turvy world of motherhood and moving boxes.