any given day

These days can bleed together like a red towel in a load of whites. I’m not even sure of the actual date most days and sometimes feel as if I’ve lived two in one. Other times it seems an hour can mysteriously disappear like homework, or anything else we can’t seem (don’t want) to keep up with. 

Sometimes I wake up disoriented, knees drawn up as if I’m sitting horizontally. It’s eerie how it can feel I’m being reborn each morning, starting with the infancy of my first thoughts (Where am I? What’s going on?) to real grown-up time once it snaps back. I suppose in some ways we are birthed perpetually as we’re delivered through the womb of sleep. We simply present a day older, and hopefully a bit wiser for whatever we have lost to and gained from yesterday. 

I have a gangly puppy bum-rushing my bed before I’m upright. She plays tackle like she hasn’t seen me in ages. Maybe in dog years one night’s rest is the equivalent of an actual trip around the earth. It seems my dog has even less of a grasp on time than I do, and without question more energy. 

I hear the kids shuffling a bit earlier now that we’ve gained an hour. The mornings aren’t like drawn curtains as much. I find the moon still waning into the gray against the breaking dawn. This is that small window where it’s easiest to get up and going before the days begin to retire early and leave us with more darkness than daylight. The days where it’s dark when most leave for work and dark when they head home. Our lights will glow with a golden filter and this old house will once again show her age through moans and creaks. I do believe I have a fall home.

I don’t entirely exit my dream state until at least 4 ounces of coffee kicks in. I have my caffeine intake down to a prescribed science. Everything sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher talking to me until then. My inability to engage verbally doesn’t keep me from moving full-speed ahead. It just means my brain hasn’t caught up with my body yet. This is also the reason my brain cannot recall where I last laid _______ (fill in the blank). I can’t very well be expected to both DO and then REMEMBER what I do. 

By now I’ve moved on to rinsing water bottles and a peanut butter knife. Using my damp dish hands I smooth out a little boy’s cowlick that’s hissing like a snake at the kitchen light. We have a somewhat choreographed routine, twirling around one another to reach toothbrushes and mated socks. All the while the pup weaves below anticipating our every move like the floor is lava. It’s the same scene and same characters rehearsing the very same act with subtle edits.

It can make you dizzy with joy or with frenzy. 

It’s either a hamster wheel or a ferris wheel. 

We pick our portion and sometimes I’m a poor picker. 

There will forever be hard and hustle and hurry and it can cause a mad motion blur. The kind where all the details are lost. These moments become the negatives we never develop and squint to make out later on when we want to remember exactly what we did with the strength of our lives. I stuff my minivan with backpacked kiddos and an Australian shepherd who thinks she’s the same, and we start into this one and only day. A day that’s like so many other days. And with a sip of hot coffee with steam on a crisp fall morning, I pick not as poorly my portion.