2003-04-23-7:55 p.m.

You never see them coming, these last thumbsuckings, last packages of diapers, last childish goodnight kisses. They seem just like all the rest. They blend in. There's no way you can tell them from the rest until they've come and gone.

It makes me want to grasp everything with a desperation that's a little scarey. What if she never says that word in that funny way again? What if they never again play hide and seek in the dark?

I used to be able to look out my bathroom window and see an old tire out there on the ground. We made a sandbox out of it for Andrew last year. He loved it and it kept him from wandering the neighborhood and scaring us to death. Somewhere along the way it got moved and the sand was scattered so that you can't tell it even used to be there, and brilliant yellow-orange wildflowers grew around the tire and inside the tire and said, look how things are different - different and haphazard and beautiful. And I meant to take a picture of it. I imagined the picture blown up big on the wall and it would have reminded me of how you go from one thing to the next without planning it or even wanting it and how it all ends up okay even if it really, really, really hurts sometimes. But the next time I looked out that window the man who mows our lawn had come and the wildflowers were gone and the tire was just a tire, big and black against the green grass.

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