After the Storm

After the torrential rains of yesterday, with the departure of the sickly sticky humidity that made the cool comfort of the Sassafras House feel like the bowels of the caves found to our north, we fling open windows this morning and invite fresh breezes with the yank of a screen door.  Gone are Mommy's anxieties about power outages and lightning-crisped goats; today we can nap with both eyes closed.

On days like this one, I forget that there are appointments to be made and bills to be satisfied.  Since I've slept like a volcano and satisfied my homesickness with dreams of the town I grew up in, I am refreshed and enthralled with the simplest pleasures: watching my eighteen-week-old daughter mesmerize herself with her own frantically waving hands, make up baby talk lyrics to Django's Rhinehardt's lazy version of "Moonglow", giving Honey a belly scratch with my toes from the
comfort of the nursery glider, etc.

For one blessed morning, life is peaceful, unpressed.  There lies an undercurrent of sadness in the quiet -- last Saturday, after weeks of awaiting the discovery of the right candidates, I drove to the Texas state line with Ava's Aunt Jess on pacifier duty in the backseat and delivered Amos and Delilah into the waiting arms of their new Mommy and Daddy.  Without them here, the house seems dimmer and oddly pristine, like an office.  Sometimes I think I hear their impatient barking, and I'm still not accustomed to using their former quarters as the bathroom it was intended to be.  

Something of their pleading eyes and lop-eared smiles will never leave that room where they slept snuggled up with one another in a knot of snot and fluff, leaving me to wonder if it's the memory left of habit or some kind of pug life-force residual that causes the knot in my throat to rise when I pass by that room.  

I know they're being cared for properly and likely being carried from room to room like the roly-poly royalty they are, and that assurance reminds me that we did right by them, but I don't know if I'll ever shed the conviction that giving them up for adoption was the kindest option because I had failed them.  They needed me, and all I could pause to give them was food and the occasional head scratch.  I hope that as I rock my Ava Leigh in this quiet hour of the morning, they linger in the laps and arms of their new owners, reassured of the Master's provision and that the world is as it should be.