Burnt Toast

I realized halfway through my “breakfast” that I was eating burnt toast.  I feel justified about putting the word “breakfast” in quotations because it’s not really even a shadow of that meal I used to know in which I could sit quietly at a table and read something and think about how Joni Mitchell turned an absolutely perfect phrase when she wrote about how, in the morning, the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all her senses.

Instead, I now stand up during the event, delivering sippy cups and retrieving spoons from the sticky floor and fielding constant demands for more or less of everything and anything a toddler might desire.

So, the toast was burnt and that wasn’t going to change because I didn’t actually have time to taste the piece I was eating anyway, let alone make a new one.  And that is my life right now, a mom of 3 kids aged 3 and under.  The burnt toast phenomenon  somehow seems like a perfectly appropriate metaphor.

The Moon

Kids finally in bed, I fled the house for a bottle of wine, a Red Box and some cake sold in a plastic to-go container in the bakery of a grocery store.  I wasn’t sure if it would be a date with my husband or just myself, but I was a bit desperate to distinguish this Friday night from every other exhausted night of the week.

S0, in the middle of nowhere special (look up the phrase in a dictionary and you’ll see a photo of a suburban strip mall parking lot), I glanced up and saw

the moon.

The air was a fresh, white sheet snapping in my lungs and the sky was black around this serene celestial body.

And reflexively, the gasp of a drowning person momentarily bobbing above the thrashing, sucking ocean,

a sob caught in my throat by virtue of the pure stillness and silence of that round orb.