Wednesday Wonderings: of crickets, moons and grandgirls

 

 Picture taken last night, in our front yard just after the moon's rising.

The air is still tonight, warm and balmy after an exceptionally hot day on the central coast of California. Ninety-five degrees. Rare for October, but not unheard of. Fourteen Octobers ago, we moved our furniture into this house - and it was over 100 that Saturday. Thankfully, such temperature extremes are rare here.

There's a cricket outside the window tonight, a particularly noisy one, singing his song into the warm night air. And the moon is full, gloriously so, making the yard look beautiful, in an unearthly, dappled-light sort of way. Every once in a while, the cricket takes a break from his outrage against the night, and I find I am relieved for a few seconds. Relieved not to have to hear that high-pitched whine, the one that is finding its way into the bedroom much more easily than usual because of all the open doors and windows. 

We had our grandgirls today. The little one all day long - her with the wild and crazy hair, the ever-present binky, the extreme physicality of an almost twenty-month old. The older one joined us after her kindergarten class ended at 3:00. She goes to school just down the street from us, so it's easy to pick her up on the days we care for her sister. Today, we let them swim - the bigger girl in our very old built-in swimming pool, the younger one in a wading pool I set up on the lawn. The big pool was COLD - we have no heater and today's temperature was a blip in the usual cool weather for this month. But girl and grandad had fun anyhow.

And baby and I? We enjoyed splashing - me with the hose, she with her water toys. Every so often, she'd climb over the edge of the plastic pool and run like a crazy girl around the lawn, then jump back in, ready for more wet stuff. She makes me laugh out loud. Sometimes she surprises me with whole sentences; sometimes I struggle to understand what she's trying so valiantly to tell me. All of the time, I love being with her. Her small, strong body is beautiful to me. The ease with which she inhabits it, the limits to which she pushes it - and me. All of it is delightful.

 These pictures are from this last summer, on vacation in Santa Cruz. No pictures today.

 

But I'm glad it's only one or two days a week. A full day with a busy toddler leaves both my husband and me just about done in. So we say to each other, at the end of each Wednesday and each Friday: "I'm so glad we had our kids when we were young!"

Maybe that's what the cricket's song is all about - an expression of fatigue at the end of a long, good day. Maybe I'll choose to believe that. And maybe it won't sound quite so much like a whine after all.



Joining with these friends tonight, some of them long-time and long-neglected! And one of them new to me this week: