Cold clear morning

Monday morning dawned clear and cold.  I went out at 6:30 for my first run in six days.  Last week I my first real migraine – an unwelcome return to the country of pain –  and I have new respect for those of you who deal with those regularly.  Then Grace, Whit and I had a wide open morning.  We headed into Boston to visit the new playground, an outing they’ve both been agitating frantically for.

Because it was early, and because it was cold, we were alone at the playground.  And what a playground it is!  The kids ran wild, and then the three of us spent a long, long time on the zipline.  We each rode the zipline to the end, bouncing back after hitting the big black spring.  We laughed, hard, over and over again.  Then the kids rode it together.

Boston was gray and brown in the background.  Grace noted that the world was the color of Still’s (the sparrow who spends the night on our front porch) feathers.  The day before, as we drove home from New Hampshire, we had had a long conversation about state house domes, and we found the gold dome of Boston’s state house among the Beacon Hill roofs.  “It looks the Gold Dome in Jerusalem!” exclaimed Whit, drawing the first-ever parallel, I’m pretty sure, between our state’s state house and the Dome of the Rock.  “There’s not as much mosaic,” he observed, after staring for a few minutes.

And then we walked back to the car, our shadows falling long behind us.  I remembered another empty day, when the three of us did trapeze.  I found myself begging the universe: please let them continue to be enchanted by such small adventures, please give me more cold air full of their peals of laughter, please don’t take these mornings, somehow gorgeously rich precisely because they are so empty, away from me yet.