Caretaking City

Boy, what a weekend of caretaking! Kids, parents, all around. The first time ever that I arrived with a big box of food--cooked food, at that--for the bedridden. I cooked more. I cleaned. I did yard work, planted lilies that were dropped off from my parents' friend who was fall-cleaning her garden. I hauled trash to the dump, and purchased a new dustpan, and even iced a cake for my dad's birthday (well, I opened the icing container and handed the spatula to Samira).

Heavens, am I tired.

Here's what's on my mind this morning though. At the end of each day, I thought I'd relax by leafing through my home's household magazines. Looking at a collection that ranges from the New Yorker, to Opera News, to Real Simple, I chose the latter, thinking, it's kind of mindless, it's easy, and maybe I'll pick up a usable tip for organizing my life and home. I was really tired, the kind of tired where it's easy to think, "I can't read anything real." I thought it might be refreshing for a change just to leaf through a magazine.

It wasn't, and that got me thinking. Dissatisfied, I put it aside and switched off the light and settled into bed. Often as mothers we think we don't have the energy for real reading. I've heard so many mothers say this. I've probably said it myself: "Oh, I don't have time to read. I couldn't possibly. I'm exhausted by the time I get to bed." Much of that is probably true, except when it's not. I've been musing over what it felt like to read the Odyssey during all those nursing sessions, to read it without pressure to finish fast, without a book group deadline, without anyone over my shoulder, without--in my case--anyone even knowing what I was reading, or caring to know. I'm remembering how refreshing it felt, yes really, and yes, I do feel like nerd-mom coming out of the closet here. Good literature is refreshing, those words strung together so carefully in their sentences, the sentences linked, feeding each other. Even a few pages: I think this would be more refreshing, more spirit lifting than the 150-word blurbs that fill most magazines. Something to bring us into another world, a world of imagination, where care is not about the specific details of homes and children, but about narrating the honest intimacies of daily life and the emotions that fill those days.

Right now, I'm reading The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I'd never read as a child. My daughter's school play this year is A Little Princess, so FHB is very much up right now in our home. A few pages at a time.

Happy week to everyone.