yesterday my girls and i went to brunch at a quaint old-lady place in simsbury and then drove to buckland hills mall where i had to make good on a promise of a shopping spree for meg and libby. katie - vastly pregnant - mostly hung out on benches with her hugely swollen feet up, slurping lemonade. then we met jamie for a very late lunch.
i wondered as i sat in the cool dark booth if maybe this was the last time i would have all my babies... all together... as MY babies, not as anyone else's anything. i watched them tease and joke and laugh, these golden children of mine and from the bottom of my soul i felt blessed. there they all were, so healthy and so strong, young and rosy with life. jamie talked about his plan for the future, meggie batted around her ideas for a major, libby bemoaned high school. katie listened when they bickered and i looked at her and laughed. baby jake even woke up and kicked a few times, just to let us know he' s on his way. it was just an ordinary lunch in an ordinary place in an ordinary afternoon, but it was one of those moments i will file away in my memory, to savor again and again like a photograph or a film.
for of any work i ever do, of far greater importance to everything than any book i could ever write, i have always believed that my real legacy to the World are my children. if i do nothing else, achieve nothing else, and offer nothing else, i have given the world four bright, healthy, happy people. if i had to die today, which i most sincerely hope i don't, i would at least know that what i have always believed to be my "real" work was done as well as i could do it. i saw it yesterday, in the faces and the voices and the laughter of my children.
next time we are all together, i think, baby jake will have joined us. things are already cooking ... katie is already dilating and effacing.
and so we stand on the threshold, my children and i. blessed be.
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