some short stories that i've came apon while 'renovating' my blog..lol..its really sweet.
Sickness and Health
"Is that your husband?" The ER nurse is pointing to you, the fever-spiked lump who is snoring softly and muttering beside me. We've been here for hours, and for hours I've returned my lips over and over to your scalding forehead, as if to cool it, or, perhaps, to comfort myself. In just a little while longer, we'll find out that what you have is a severe case of strep, and you will swallow the prescribed pills, and I will finally put my lips to your quietly sleeping forehead and feel a welcome coolness.
But for now the nurse's face is creased with compassion and weariness — she is waiting — and it's not really the right time to tell her about your gentle strength: the way you rocked our baby in the sling for hours on end while you graded papers, rocked another baby three years later while you did your anatomy homework, babies peacefully asleep across your broad chest for what feels like my entire adult life. It's not the right time to explain what a funny contradiction you are, a hockey-playing massage therapist, or how just last week you lay your hands on a friend's father while he lay dying in hospice.
She wouldn't understand how funny it is that you gave me bedtime coupons — promising to turn in early on the nights I redeem them — because you're a night owl and I miss you in bed, or how it feels when I come down in the morning to a toasty kitchen because you've already lit a fire in our wood stove. She doesn't know that I'm strangely euphoric, sitting here thinking about how lucky I am to have so much to lose — my rock, my mystery, the love of my life — that I'm sitting here thinking in sickness and in health. I will, I think. I do. But all I can say is yes. "Yes. That's my husband."
Catherine Newman is the author of Waiting for Birdy.
Work and Play
A few months ago, when my husband and I transitioned our son, Sawyer, into a big-boy bed, he refused to nap alone. We explained that we couldn't sleep with him; there was no room in his bed. Of course, he found a loophole. "Sleep next to my bed," he said. "There's room on my rug." Except he kept peeking over his guardrail to giggle at the sight of us. "Use my blanket and build a tent and you lie under it on the rug," he said, "so I don't see you." From our hideout in the tent, we kept still, listening to our little boy rustling like a safari cub.
When Sawyer's breath began to ebb and flow more evenly, I plotted our escape in my mind, then blurted out loud, "Uh oh." Sawyer stirred. I whispered the problem in Geoffrey's ear: "I left my glasses on his nightstand." Geoffrey ducked out to rescue my specs. Sawyer rolled over on his pillow, sighed, and smacked his lips. Geoffrey barely made it back into the tent without waking him. If we tried to leave now, we'd risk Sawyer's hearing the creak of floorboards, the doorknob's click, our dog panting in the hallway.
We didn't dare. We stayed put. Strewn about the rug, the whole Crayola rainbow, plastic dinosaurs, and hardened crumbs of Play-Doh. Along the rug's perimeter, Sawyer had lined up an assortment of toy cars that belonged to my husband when he was a boy. Geoffrey plucked a tiny metal wagon from the lot and whispered in my ear, "I used to put a peanut in this." He hitched it to an old-fashioned yellow car and towed it over my shoulder. It tickled. He put his hand over my mouth to stifle my laugh. I heard a crayon break under the weight of my back. But Sawyer was breathing deeply now, having drifted into the peaceable hum of sleep. I thought we would ready ourselves to leave.
Instead, Geoffrey picked up the stubby end of a green crayon and a ragged piece of construction paper. He drew a hangman hook and the dotted lines of a secret message. I grinned. Geoffrey rolled the crayon toward me so that I could use it to guess a letter. Then I rolled it back to him. I got the first few wrong. One by one, Geoffrey drew a head, a long center line for the body, both legs and a foot. He had the same smirk on his face as when he beats me at tennis — not at all sorry. "Give up?" he mouthed, then filled in the puzzle: You are my sunshine. With the length of my arm, I swept away the mess and snuggled in close.
Pari Chang's essay "Pregnant Pause" appears in the newly published anthology Behind the Bedroom Door, edited by Paula Derrow.
Cream and Sugar
I've been married to Jason for over 17 years. Which means I've woken up beside him something like 46,225 times. That's a really nice thing, easing into the new day with a person you dig. And whether one or both of us are rushing out the door with the kids during the week or we're savoring the horizontal-friendly nature of the weekends, our mornings always kick off the same way: with coffee.
One morning a while back, on a day when I was lucky enough to be the last one up, I bumbled downstairs, went to pour my first cup, and found a little scribble of a note next to the freshly brewed pot.
Three words: Wake up sleeper.
It made me ridiculously happy. There were a few things at work here. There was the white mug thoughtfully pulled from the cabinet and placed on the counter, there was the steamy jet-black coffee waiting to be poured, and there was the message, with its undertones of both comfortable domesticity and flirty middle-school note-passing. I promptly tucked it away for safekeeping.
He was back at it the next morning. And the next. And the next. He wrote on whatever was handy — scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, hotel stationery, Post-its — and about whatever was on his mind.
Some, like the first, were simple a.m. greetings:
First cup and Welcome to the day
Some seemed to have an audible, built-in sigh:
What a week and Keep parenting
Some commemorated a family milestone:
Last Saturday in this house and 16 years!
Some focused on our couple-ness, which is to say putting our parenting purposely out of focus:
City dwelling, late night eating partner! and Super weekend with you
And one was composed of just eight letters and a symbol:
Everyday ♥
I don't think Jason knows I saved these notes, each and every one, in an envelope in the cupboard. We never talked about this exchange; somehow it became a silent, sacred ritual. Which is precisely why, without warning or fanfare, this issue of Redbook will be left open to this very page ... and placed right next to our coffee pot.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal is the creator of "The Beckoning of Lovely," a YouTube project, and the author of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.
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