I am feeling particularly sentimental tonight, even for me.
It is a breezy, crisp evening. The sun has long since set and the new leaves now scour a sapphire sky. The air feels autumnal as I perform my small evening rituals, all tea-making and milk-bottle-washing.
It is a night that longs to be inhabited, sweatered and hatted and glasses filled in the back yard. It is a night that silently wishes it had a fire, that asks for nothing but that is full of possibility, an overflowing void.
But there is no fire. There is no sweater, no hat. There is no wine. It is the middle of spring, not the beginning of fall.
There was a fire on a mountain thousands of miles away that burned the better part of my childhood. It raped the paths and the rocks and the blueberry bushes where my mother and I spent golden summer afternoons. There have been other fires, too, fires that took away places and people and things I've loved and forgotten and remembered again.
My daughter now insists on bathing unaided, preferring to grapple by herself with the mysteries of soaps and valves and gels; she wants to "be big". I am in no hurry but I know that her fire will come eventually, inevitably, as it does to all parents of children, and to all children of parents.
I've wasted much time wishing they were older and didn't need me so much. I got my wish. Now take it back. Please.
