We've a loud house.
Loud with laughter, and
squealing, and crying, and bickering, and roughhousing for sure. (And no, I'm not mentioning here the raised voice of a sometimes frazzled Mama, thank you very much.) Sometimes the whirl of childhood happening around me is so, so loud that I literally cover my ears. Of
course it isn't loud all of the time. There are varying degrees of
loudness, depending on who is at school, who is napping, who is,
gulp, on screens.
It was loud in our old
tiny
cozy house with four growing kids. I thought that moving to a larger
house would spread the noise out a bit. Silly me. It seems wherever
Honey and I are, within minutes there are the four littles. Full energy
zooming around us, clustered near us, piled on top of us.
At times it is so loud I turn off whatever music I am trying to listen to. Sometimes, I simply turn it louder.
Honestly
I find moments of quiet more jarring than the loud. The still
noiselessness unfamiliar to me. When there is that very rare quiet it takes me time to settle into its vastness, get comfortable
in its unblinking truth, not sure what to do in the company of only myself.
But
those times are few, and short-lived. And that is okay for now. That
little glimpse of what is to come when the kids are grown and out of the
house is enough for me to fully embrace the loud I live in now. Not
just embrace, but celebrate, and sometimes even encourage.
So within this loud I am constantly looking for the lovely. The lovely that is here if only I have eyes to see it.
Playing.
Creating.
Moleskine notebooks.
Balloons.
Winter wonder land.
Blue skies.
A school assignment.
Learning to wash your hands.
And then there is this.
A sculpture by my talented niece
artist. The class assignment was "first mode of transportation." I bought it from her the moment I spied it.
Talk about lovely.
Even though my babies are no longer in my belly, it is a gentle reminder of my responsibility to transport them through this loud - and lovely - childhood.
