So much I haven’t written about, much more than I can now say in the catching up, the trying to catch up. And I’ve been lagging, with procrastination born of ordinary tasks piled up to where I don’t know where to start, like which piece of laundry to pick up first and wash what color clothes and linens…

Too much unsaid, like the things we should have said, wanted to say, to loved ones, but people rushed in and rushed out, and it’s only—again—at the last hour of the last evening or morning that we reach that deep level of communication, at the core of the heart and of life.

They came, they laughed, they enjoyed each other and the freedom from nagging demands—cell phones off, laptops tucked out of sight, email curtailed—and they voiced their gratitude for the chance to breathe deep.

Now they’re gone again, leaving behind them piles of wrappings from Christmas in July…

(what we almost always do, with birthdays falling then and all those other gifts not given when Christmas came, or autumn or springtime birthdays or Mother’s or Father’s day or…. We play catch up with that, too. Try to. And then rush on)

… leaving behind piles of linens to launder—and piles of blessings to count in the sudden silence:

The wonder and joy of seeing the boys grown men, grown good, caring fathers. The wonder of the little ones, their wonder at the world around, earnest desire to help with everything, of baby warmth and big, full-souled, toothless smiles.

The laughter echoes silent in the silence somehow and I think of all the other things I didn’t tell about: the garden bounty: overload of strawberries—we never had so many…

overload of peas, right on the heels of the children’s exit, giving us busy-work to obscure that awful silence…

overload of fatigue from having said yes to too much in the two months before they came, and the determination never to do that again (but didn’t I resolve that before, and forget?)

Yes, too much to tell. So many blog posts all blipped here in this one—and then all the other things not even mentioned.

I don’t know the value of this blogging for others, or even for myself, perhaps, but I do know this: if I don’t do it henceforth, I’ll feel, as now, that I left too much undone, too much I didn’t tell about.

And so I write.