Sweet Moses, As Always: Photo Essay

Summer arrives by way of spring blooms. Up and down our street--Charlotte Street, pronounced like the girl not the Vermont town--I walk with sweet Moses in the sling and point out the flowers to him. In the morning, when he sleeps, I listen to the bird calls. I only recognize the mourning doves which have been here since his February birth.

Moses has his father's eyes. Piercing and open, they're the most expressive feature on his face besides perhaps the dimples in his upper cheeks when he smiles. The way his eyes squint up like that reminds me of my own eyes and cheeks.

It's hard to tell who he looks like. His eyebrows are clowny, his mouth a bright bloom. How do you explain the way it feels to be smiled at by your sweet child? Some nights I light candles for our bath. He likes to float in the streaky light. I cup his back with one hand and rest the other on his chest. He kicks his little legs and pushes off of the sides of the tub when his feet meet the porcelain.

I work hard to capture him in photographs...

...his essence, something of his life, what it's like for him to be in the world...

He is a happy baby.

Content.

Sometimes, in the bath, he stares at me while I tell him stories. When you grow up, I say, or when you were born... I remember when he was around a month old he'd stare at me and I'd ask him, "Where are you from, little one?" Sometimes he'd smile. Other times we'd go on staring at each other. My heart only survives this love by understanding him as a spiritual being.

We are spiritual beings trying to be human.

His eyes are his father's eyes.

And there, see in the light, his nose...that is mine.

He cries when he wakes up in the morning. Inconsolable. I carry him to the window and say, "look, look at the trees." He looks, and is always pleased.

So many babies arriving this spring.

Zetta Rose, my sister Alida's baby, was just born the evening before the eclipse that was said to somehow align with The Pleiades--The Seven Sisters--during a new moon in Gemini.

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We spend afternoons on the porch. Mosey in his bouncy seat and me (hopefully) at the desk my husband's father made in the 70s.

You see that little red lantern? I saved it from my childhood playhouse when my parents sold their lake cabin. It was still there twenty years later. I used to fill it with sand instead of kerosene.

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When I walk alone I feel naked without Moses strapped to my belly or my hip.

Walking with him in my arms changes the world.

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We lay him in the grass and he kicks happily. What will his story be? Last night, Josh and I lay with Moses sleeping between us. What will we do when he grows up and moves far away? I asked.

I still can't believe he is ours, he said.

In every picture he is a different being.

He has taught me, among many things, how to be new again each day.

Blessings.