Oh, Sunday

It's 5:30pm and I finally got the baby down for his first nap.  He's been fighting his rest time like a maniac child, and he clearly thinks there is way more entertaining things happening just rooms away.  What is really happening is two adults and two tweens who'd like a break from chasing him!

Do you feel the summer fading?  How the air has become dry, scorched, tapped out?  Though the temps have fallen to the just the high 70s, late summer fires are rolling up and down the west coast, turning the sky to hues of amber.  Our upper field stands pointed, dried slivers of wheat grass and Queen Anne Lace crying mercy in the daylight hours.  The apple trees in the front yard are full, drooping with bushels of green goodness, and the deer have been paying their daily visits to devour what's fallen, too heavy to hold on.  In the evening, Toby, our rottie bursts into action at the noise of their hoofs.  During the day, he lays resting, hardly glancing their way.  He knows danger when he sees it, and it is not his precarious, apple grubbing, hoofed friends.

I've been hanging onto these final hours.  The hours that feel like infinite rest and slumber and choice.  When the day moves along as it needs to, in the way that I need it to.  Of course the babe demands and requires much of me through the daytime, but I still have a good amount of choice, and ease, and the demands are sweet.  The summer is a time when replenishment fills and fills what feels like the well that continuously gives throughout the school year.  Thankfully, it never goes dry.

Though...

There's irony in what I'm saying, as this morning we woke to no water.

You don't realize all the ways you use water until you're faced to live a day without it.  No dishes, laundry, flushing toilets, hand washing, showers, drinking water, cooking, filling the oil diffuser.

And until about two hours ago, we sat desperate, beneath hazy skies, with no water.

So dramatic.  So dramatic.

But it wasn't the well that had gone dry.  No, it wasn't the well that plunges some 220 feet into the earth.  It was the nuisance that are little, chewing, nest-building mice, that caused the electrical short, and had Husband running around for the last four plus hours, and caused us to cancel our dinner party.  If need be, we are willing to live off the grid, but we assume our guests are not.

They happily agreed to a rain check.

But it reminds me, in these quiet moments before the school-year-weekday-alarms begin to regulate our days, of the stillness that fills me and is necessary to seek.  There's plenty to get frenzied about, and enough questionable events to spiral us down the rabbit hole--or mice-ridden well, if we let them.  We must protect our time, our hearts, and keep our well in full operation.

So while the babe sleeps, I sit here cross-legged, listening to a heartbeat monitor, and stare out the window at the parched summer haze and the corner of the property that holds the well that keeps our daily lives flowing.  I've got my books, and I'm peeking through into the lives of some old blogging friends.  It's respite to my soul.  And I welcome the rest of this day with ease, in quiet, for what it gives.  Another opportunity to slow down and rest.

How have you been spending this late summer Sunday?

Rest to you today, friends.