Five

There is a quiet today.
She is purring next to me with her face held to the sky.  Soft nose tickles to remind and test.
Your brother is sleeping right now.  Light breaths loud enough to tell me he is okay.  Reminding me of past worries.
The dark is setting in and my own breaths slow with the cold.  The blanket keeps him asleep longer than I should let him.  I let it.  I want this time alone to last.  Time to think of you.  With you.  With my five year old boy.  What do you know now?  How fast do you run?  Do you read stories long forgotten here?  I want to talk to you and be marveled at your boyhood wisdoms.  I want you to tell me you're too big to be held.  And here now are the tears I'd been waiting for today.  Part of my memory of your birthday.  I need them, I do.  They give me you in their own little way. 
Your snow came today.  It was the first of the season.  A late snow I think.  It was beautiful to wake up to the soft white outside my window.  Stillness, uninterrupted moments.  Something to keep. 
I set my memory by the snow and rain and wind.  You come with the snow.  Your brother with the wind.  Your sister with the rain.  My children, my reason.  Happy Birthday sweet Frost, I love you.  I will light your candles now.  Wish well.

Night, night Frost
Mama loves you

Maybe On The Last Full Moon

I drive in the dark of morning.  The tick-tock dark.  When that's all you hear, the automatic noises that fill in the spaces that open up each twilight as the light leaves.  Clocks and crickets.  Crinkling leaves and heavy breaths.  The sounds that enter the sleeping's dreams and transform into up-side-down tap dancers and floating violinists.  Night whispers that become bejeweled sky-divers and naked dragons.  These sounds are what make up my morning trek.  These sounds, coupled with the thick coat of midnight, change me in the mornings.  My mornings become a waking dream, a time when I believe anything could become true.  A time when I ask questions and am given answers in the form of a frozen deer or a rare shooting star.  Symbols I hold on to, but will never fathom.  In the dark, when I am alone, I believe that everything I see is just for me.  The giant shadows of trees, sentries that were planted long before I was born only to shield my path at that moment.  The other cars on the road, phantoms whose headlights are sent to bewilder me.  I wonder at their drivers and if they are in their own dreams or merely a piece of mine.  Perhaps I am in theirs.  The curving road, first gravel, then paved, then highway.  Slow, fast, faster, slow.  My guide in the night.  I follow it unconsciously, I remember the destination, I forget the beginning by the end.  What happened in between?  A song, a face?  Many times tears.  My favorite mornings are those when the moon travels with me.  I watch her, I search for the faces I have thrown up to her.  Those who have left me, I keep with her.   She is like a precious locket to me, and when I am alone I open her up to see the pictures of those I love.  Primarily yours, Frost.  You are always first on those mornings that the moon follows me, leads me, takes me away, took you away. 
During my dark mornings, I wonder at what I will never need to have an answer to.  I spend time on questions that are too late.  I ask out loud to skies that do not speak, hoping to be given a clue to a mystery that was never mine.  I do all of these things because I will always hope that if you were to answer me, it would be then, during the tick-tock dark of morning.

Night, night Frost
Mama loves you

Remembering That There Is Magic

I often times think about other people and how they see the world.  How their view of the world is different from mine.  I try to relate by listening to their stories and wondering at their pasts.  I wait for some magical connection.  Then I think of you.  Your world is not even close to ours here.  I imagine you watching us and learning and changing with us, but how do I know what you see or even how you see?  You didn't have a past here, but your story is one of the great ones I feel.  Your story is one that moves beyond the times, beyond the lands, beyond the changing faces and names.  Your story is one that is felt by all.  One that has moved so many to great good and great tragedy.  The extremes that have tattooed the Earth with the ink of so many hearts.  Frost, your story is one of love.  A magical connection.  Your story is within everyone I have ever known and have told your name and it is also within everyone I will never know and never say your name to.  Your story is there because it is one of purest love.  It has mingled with the millions of loves throughout time and become the tingle one feels when first holding hands.  It has become warmth of mother's embrace after a bad dream.  It is in the salt that swims in a lonely tear as a long lost love is remembered.  Your story is everywhere, every moment with everyone.  You are part of a beautiful gift that has been given to the world.  This ocean of love that we all swim in is where we find our greatest treasures. The things we are in awe of, the things we hold on to, the things we create for, the things we would die for.  Always to be remembered.  My sweet boy you are remembered always.

Night night Frost
Mama loves you

When they fall is it because they have seen too much?

Close your eyes, then lift your head to the night sky

and open them.

At first there is just darkness, then the longer you stare,

A star

comes forth and it looks at you.

and at that moment

you both are known.

The stars were down low this morning, wrapping around my path, with their wishy promises.  I envy them.  Every one of them, even though I could never see every one of them.  People either seek out their dreams through them or don't see them at all and the stars are fine with that.  When they are down low in the mornings, I feel as though I should take my shoes off and dance upon their burning points until I wind myself up to where it doesn't matter.  If I could watch from up there I could see everyone I love at once.  I could know what people think when their hearts are not hidden.  People don't hide from the stars.  Frost, is that where you are?
Night, night Frost
Mama loves you

Hollow Days

I've been walking to the end of my road every evening to watch the sunset.  My road is perpendicular to a bigger road.  A road with many cars.  I watch the cars as I wait for the colors to come.  I watch them and I wonder at the people driving them.  I wonder if they are happy as they pass by me.  I wonder if they notice me standing there.  I wonder at my own happiness as the sky deepens.  I try to remember what made me happy before you died.  I know that the moon and stars amazed me when I was young.  Is amazement the same as happiness?  Sometimes I think it could be. 
A couple of weeks ago I had a hollow day.  The hollow when you know that things aren't the way they need to be for you to breath correctly.  Things that should be automatic don't happen when the hollow days come.  The hollow when the empty places in you grow and open up and scream their own names so fiercely that others feel it just by looking into your face.  The hollow that is loneliness.  The hollow that takes over when you realize what you are missing.  Before I knew to miss you, I didn't know that I wasn't breathing fully.  I didn't know that there was something to gasp for.  I can't have you, I'm not allowed to see you.  I have these places in me that couldn't survive your loss.  Places in me that died off when you left.  These are the places that take over on hollow days.  The hollow days pass by now, but they do come back from time to time.  In the beginning they were my constant.  Sometimes I take your brother or sister with me to the end of the road to watch the sunset.  When they are with me I am reminded of the places that were born in me when they came to be my children, the places that warm and comfort me.  The places that fill me up.  I know that you share these places with them.  I know that you helped me to grow.  You brought me your own kind of light, one different from theirs.  I know all this to be true, but on the hollow days knowing how much more I could have felt through you had you stayed, that is what torments me so.  I would cherish a visit from you.
Night, night Frost
Mama loves you

Rains

Yesterday the rain came and spent the day with me.  It was a day for memories, and they sogged in like the mud around my feet as I clambered around the garden.  I tried to make the day for sleeping the way the rain usually prefers me to.  It didn't work that way yesterday.  I was called outside by the leaden sky and by your brother's curiosity.  The gentle showers were new to him, so out we went.  At first I held him in an attempt to keep him somewhat clean and dry.  I tried to show him what happened when the fat drops hit the large leaves of the hostas.  I tried to show him where the birds took shelter in the bushes and under the heavy canopy of the trees.  He wanted to make his own discoveries.  His struggles always overpower me so I let him down to explore and create.  I kept an eye on him, and then I let myself begin to feel.  The memories that came to me at first were those I had had of times before when the weather was similar.  As a child looking East, from a house which is no longer there, toward a storm that long ago ended.  As a teen, digging holes in the earth in which to plant herbs of ancient use and mystery.  As a young woman remembering a place in which she should never have been, yet she cherished so much.  These were things of my life now.  Things which I possess deep inside and bring up every so often.  The longer I stayed out in the rain the further I felt from these things.  I went deeper inside and pulled up a past I didn't recognize but still felt deeply connected to.  I became everywhere.  The longer I spent time with things that have always been here the farther back I went.  The rain was here when I was not.  The plants I tended have always been here, touched by ghostly fingers long ago.  The stones your brother brought to me, so old, so old that their secrets do not matter anymore.  The clouds forever changing, have they ever once repeated a shape?  I knew these things from before, I know I did.  And so I began to cry because I missed them even though they were right there with me.  I cried for not remembering the moments gone by.  I cried because I could feel it and yet I couldn't remember why I felt it I just knew that there was something there yesterday.  Something there that I was supposed to have but no longer did.  A connection that people bring with them from life to life.  I had found it in different places and people throughout my time here.  Yesterday I wanted to feel it more than anything.  Yesterday I missed having that bond that doesn't need words.  I missed not knowing if the ties of my histories were strong enough to carry themselves here.  I missed knowing for sure that I hadn't missed something. Or lost something.   Yesterday carried me back.  Tonight the moon brought me back to knowing.  Knowing that recognition of yourself is a gift, and if you can share your true self with another it is a treasure.  I hope that my soul is remembered.
Night, night Frost
Mama loves you

The Windshield

The other day I let my mind wander in a different direction.  I was riding in the backseat of the car next to your brother.  The trees moving to the left of me set the scene and my thoughts followed.  They weren't what was expected even though they are there every time I drive myself home from work.  I thought about what was behind them and who had been in them and how I would never know.  I thought about how many things I would never know and how many people I would never know.  I thought about the people that I do know and how out of those people there are only a very few that I want to know everything about, and some of those I will never know enough about.  I wondered at how many people want to know everything about me.  I felt sad then because I don't feel that it is very many.  It used to be more I think.  But that number changed I think.  I wondered at why some people have to leave our lives when they are the very people we want to be with us the most.  And how others are there all the time and we feel nothing.  I wished that people would let the others in their lives know the truth sooner before time takes away their chances.  It makes me sad when chances are missed.  It makes me even sadder when people don't even realize that great friendships are missed out on because the timing is off.  I think we love because we have to.
The longer I watched the trees the farther my thoughts ventured out.  I let them search for things that weren't really there.  A sound came to me then.  A humming, a buzzing, a sound of the Earth.  It was not the car moving on the road.  It was just for me.  No one else in the car heard it or would understand that it was there.  I think it may have been a memory surfacing.  My Grandmother used to hum all the time when she was alive.  I feel like I drew that up from deep within.  I feel like she and I knew that I was in urgent need of comforting at that moment.  I was on the verge of tears and as I wondered at the line of trees and let the sounds of my childhood in, I let just one tear fall.  Just one, so that no one else knew.  Just one, to let myself know that I could feel that day.  That I was alive because something so everyday could touch my soul in such a way.  Looking out the car window as things move quickly by has always been something that I draw upon in times of reflection, in times of solitude.  I feel like the most personal truths can be found as the rain drops seek out their wind-blasted paths across the edge of the windshield when driving through a thunderstorm.  I've watched those drops a thousand times and they never end up going in the direction I think they will.  They come together, they dance, they move apart, they fall off the glass, they stop and dry up.  They are pushed by their circumstance, they are left with their will.  They do what is needed for the universe to be complete no matter who notices, no matter who is touched by their existence.  I try to notice the little things, so that the little things might know that they have a purpose.  As we drove on, I noticed your brother looking out his window.  He saw an airplane and made his little hand sign for it.  I am happy that he watches for things too.  I am happy that I hear him and your sister hum to themselves from time to time.  I am happy that sometimes the little things are the most important things we are left with.
Night, night Frost
Mama loves you