Tunnel Vision

Most evenings, after dinner, you’ll find us piling into the car. We drive because it’s so beautiful here, we drive to put the three-year-old to sleep, we drive because we’re worn out and we want to fill the time between feeding and bathing in the easiest way.

I’ve never been very adept at keeping my mind tucked inside my body. It’s always floating off, connecting imagined dots somewhere up in the clouds, which makes me (I’m well aware) a real danger on the road. With Jonathan behind the wheel, I’m free to tell stories in my head, so I do. So many stories.

They’re meant for you; I’m sure of it. Someday (soon, I hope) I’ll share them. But for now … well, I’ve entered a kind of nine-months-pregnant tunnel.

It’s a strange, foggy place. Most of the things I normally value in life seem lost in the general grayness. Like writing for this blog or returning phone calls. Other seemingly unimportant things loom inexplicably large. Like painting my bedroom furniture.

Yes, the baby’s room is a mess of odds and ends, and the bassinet I recently ordered through the mail is still sitting in its unopened box exactly where the UPS man left it last week. But I can’t tell you how vitally, vitally important it has been to attack my bed with white paint.

Please, baby girl, just hold on till the paint dries.

I’m not sure if I’ll be in this space much before she arrives. I do promise I’ll be back before long.

There is so much here (in this new place and season) worth noticing, and I don’t think these things are meant only for me. Things like a full moon rising over a quilt-square patch of corn. Things like driving the same country road night after night until the night when one wrong (right?) turn takes you through a field of sunflowers.

Those things must mean something. They must be a part of some very good story.

I’ll be sure to let you know what I discover. Once the fog recedes.