My son chooses Blonde on Blonde, All Summer Long which is Beach Boys, and Count Basie Best of when he calls now in response to me running my finger along today’s vinyl picks. The strawberries from Sam’s Club are from Watsonville and how the 101 used to smell like strawberries especially this time of year. In truth I don’t think they’re nearly as sweet as eating them there. But they wink a small yesness in the center of my heart each time I bite into one, and that makes me feel awake, in the grace of thanks-giving for the day.

Visions of Johanna plays I get the baby out of her high chair and it is the second time in a day I have memories of a long ago sister whom I was at one time very close. It makes me think again over there in my head, that’s where my sweetheart is today with two of our other kids. Other side of the bridge, doing a day for dad and daughter’s along the Bay in Baltimore City. I can practically feel the fat blooms of salt crease on my cheeks as I write this, the heady smells of flowering trees in blossom. Living memories of where I grew up.

It is not until I am drinking a smoothie that it comes back to me, Domenical, being in Costa Rica at 19 and the fruit smoothie I had there. My life feeling like it was waking to me for the first real time. Outside barefoot in the sand, on the jungle path, all the time. I wonder again for like the 10th time this week at the sensory body and memory, my body so awake to other time lines this season. I pause as I write this, the second time today in my new house I am in front of a window and feel the newness of heat from morning sun. New here, I have never been in this house, the one I yearned and worked a long, long time for, when it first becomes Spring.

New here. If there is anything I’d tell a new mom, I am thinking to myself, it’s that Joy resourcing can’t only come from your kid. You’ve got to be equipped enough to be able to go and resource yourself for yourself without the little. I am frazzled at the edges: it has been a week like life will bring ya where you simply can’t tap out because TOO MUCH. Too much work self baby self mom self home self no time for me? at all. And I’m well-resourced overall, I make my whole living teaching people the importance of it, the hows and follow through etc

Still I am fried. Most weeks it’s just the Isness of my details right now this stage of my sweet Life, but also most weeks I at least get those times to and for me. So fried can near calm with grace of a good nights sleep. So anyway. Music on and strawberries from the 101. I’m turning it all off.

Mama n bae are heading to the beach~