PS - I turned 31

Wow, that's a lot of time to spend being alive. I don't have a particularly distinguished set of accomplishments to go with those 31 years, but this last year I added a new baby and a midwifery license to them. I think creating a new human can be a significant accomplishment for my 31st year.

While nothing hugely significant happened on my birthday, my kids did wish me a happy birthday approximately 12,425 times; this made me feel both loved and slightly annoyed. We went hiking:



Again, at Point Defiance, but this time on the other side of the point; we walked from Fort Nisqually to the Gig Harbor lookout, and then followed the spine trail back to where we'd parked. Oops, they learned something:



Obligatory Chubble photos for the day (here hanging at the playground after our hike):






When we got home, the kids noticed that our blackberry tangles finally had ripe berries, and went about harvesting and processing them:



Meanwhile, Fran made us all chips in the deep-fry and started dinner on the grill, and we had a very nice evening. The kids really, really wanted to make me a cake, and this process narrowly skirted disaster but did - miraculously enough - result in a cake. I am the proud owner of three new necklaces, which apparently is THE THING to get your mom on her 31st birthday.

It was a non-spectacular but happy day. And...onward.

Poetry

The refrigerator roars into the sudden silence of our napping home.

Produce sits subservient on grocery store shelves.

I pound a dizzying rhythm on the keyboard, the poetry returned to my inner monologue; I feared it lost forever, to age or fatigue or something even more difficult to enumerate - as if one can name or number the loss of an inner poetic voice in the first place - but here it is again.

My internal voice doesn't just seize at the random flotsam of everyday stimulation, the way it has for the past couple of years; it narrates a coherent stream. Sentences often unfinished, yes, but narration (and not simple overwhelmed observation) nonetheless.

I don't know whether this blog post will be comprehensible to anyone at all, or whether every person I pass has an internal poetic monologue that I can't hear or sense. I set it out to the world (bearing in mind that grandiose concept that anyone can read this blog, though few do), anyway.

Thank you B and ~L~

I think she likes it!