Monday, January 04, 2021

A Sunny Winter Morning With Sullivan

I'm sitting at the kitchen table once again, listening to Sully do his schoolwork. I'd had this idea that it would be fun to sit with him and try to write a blog post while he worked on his weekly journal entry assignment (what am I, new?), but it turns out it's kind of difficult to construct coherent sentences while someone is sitting next to you saying, "THIS. T-H-I-S, this, this, this weeeeeeeekend—WEEKEND, W-E-E-K-E-N-D, was fun, F-U-N. This weekend was fun, this weekend was fun...hmm....what did we even do this weekend? Mom, what did we do this weekend? I need four more sentences..."

Oh well. I'll look back on this in ten years, as one does, and think to myself, "I miss those sunny winter mornings, sitting at the kitchen table across from six-year-old Sullivan, listening to Nick Drake and quietly writing together, pausing every now and again to share a smile or a joke, him to ask me how to spell the occasional word, me to let him know how proud I was of his neat writing and his advanced sentence structure. I did my best writing in those special moments, too. His very presence sparked my creativity. Now I can't get two words down because all I can think about is him speeding around town in that old car of his with no adult supervision..."

Is this what people mean when they talk about living in the moment—trying to capture that rosy ten-years-in-the-future feeling before you've left the present? It's just one of those phrases I've always heard that I thought I understood...but now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I never have? 

I was about to say that I'm not even sure how to go about that, exactly, but then I realized that, even if it wasn't a conscious thing, this is actually part of the reason I like blogging and taking pictures so much—because if "trying to capture that rosy ten-years-in-the-future-feeling before you've left the present" isn't the most accurate description of blogging and taking pictures, I don't know what is.

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