You’ve slipped away to bed with the baby once more, while I move cautiously through the house, seeking small, quiet tasks I can finish and lay aside for you, folded like origami. Each chamber becomes a space you can awaken into as you wander, a gift brewing like the first cup of coffee in the morning, the frayed ends of your many lists already singed and settling.
There is a softness in these moments when we linger as a family, a little longer, while our daughter begins to improvise tomorrow aloud, checking off her necessities, rewiring the storyline with reasonable justifications she has gathered from the pond like pretty stones. We sit here, with large glasses of water before us, and a bowl of dressed cabbage resting nearby. To grow older together in this way, to keep intact the family embrace she so often asks for; to sustain the marriage and its routines of work and waking, not letting them drift toward neglect; to permit ourselves to craft our own narrative, to board the right train, to see that there are still seats reserved for us, to watch the landscape outside unfurl in harmony along this single route, steering toward the exact point on the map we agreed upon.
How right it would feel to preserve the memory of being at the dinner table at night, and, before baths and bedtime, to fling one last jacket around, since the night is clear after all—and to step out onto the driveway, hats set on our heads, holding hands or not, but together, and simply look up.
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Excerpted from The Red Goose by Allen Guy Wilcox, available from Doubly Mad.
