Push-Ups: Still A Good Morning

Let me publicly (interesting to note: this blogger considers the online forum a public venue) declare right here, right now, with a 100% certainty you can take to your local bank and drop into an interest-bearing account or CD, that there is absolutely NOTHING which rends asunder the peace of a still Saturday morning with more speed than a tooth-brushing session with a certain white Wonder Pup! (Yes, he has attained capital letter status even without his proper name attached.) The moment that overgrown front paw flicked chicken-flavored toothpaste into the air, thus ensuring a schmear on my glasses lens and a spattering on my freshly washed hair, not to mention the thick daub on his foot which he then proceeded to spot all along the kitchen floor, it was all over but the shoutin'! Literally.

Before that heinous episode, my thoughts centered around the remnants of a post-midnight visit between my oldest and youngest children which were scattered from the living room coffee table to the kitchen island. Usually, the mere fact that cups and food and shoes had NOT been put away before retiring for the evening would incite me to mild inner riot. Mama doesn't like to rise-and-shine to a messy home and hearth. Can't we all just wash a few dishes, put our clothes away, stack the lap blankets and turn out the extra lights?! But today, full of good-feeling and yet digesting tasty homemade sushi from an evening spent catching up on the back of a fully-involved week with my husband and hostess neighbor (not sure if that sentence works but I'm leaving it in), I awoke with my rose-colored glasses perched atop my Hultgren family nose.

The partially finished cup of milk in my Scrabble mug told a line from a sweet little story of sibling friendship. The package of opened sesame rice crackers (there's an 'almost-pun' in there) on the counter, sitting next to the half an avocado, was yet another bread crumb in an unfolding trail of revelation as to how a late-night session of snack-and-chat played out. The tossed couch pillows and television remote the punctuation for it all. The mother in me warmed to the notion of my grown and growing babies choosing to spend their precious personal time together: in this case, big sister, Ashley, tired and hungry after a full 9-5 at her desk job, followed by another on-her-feet 5 hours spent seating seafood lovers at their tables for the big shrimp fest, "endless shrimp for $15," at Red Lobster Restaurant; and, only brother, Zachary, just home from an across-town jaunt to a rousing rivalry of a football game in which his high school dropped into the loser position but many a stellar blow-by-blow play was executed, regardless. Mom and dad had officially bowed out of the evening, weary bones eager to surrender to the pillow, so we offered no real company other than the quick bedside conversation and hug session standard to all evenings.

Baby Zachary bonding with Ashley at a very young age.

(Our little dog, Rosie, was dying of illness here.
The girls were saying good-bye before we had her euthanized.)

The loveliness, the tenderness, the security roused within me, as mental picture after mental picture marched across my fertile brain in regards to the activities of the by-products of my fertile womb -- this array of feelings conspired to affirm my role as mother and caretaker and keeper of the family flame. A welcome wind of refreshing which aired out what can quickly become an inner room of stale air and dust bunnies when guilt and worry and stress collect. It also served to dislodge a memory from the Valdez Bunch archives of another moment between siblings, this one shared by Zachary and middle child, Sarah, when we yet lived in Colorado. Years before the wagon train journey to the South. Years before sleep became a hot commodity not to be interrupted even by texting once it took hold!

Who doesn't want to squeeze Sarah's cheeks?!

The two of them used to enjoy what they liked to refer to as "Pal Night." This bit of camaraderie involved waking up in tandem sometime in the youngest part of the early morning after a few hours of sleep. They would raid the pantry -- my post-witness to the events always revealed popcorn kernels and empty cups, sometimes fruit or the rare candy I might have had hidden (evidently not so very hidden) in a jar -- and then share their loot in our small living room by the light of whatever entertaining kiddie show they found on the television. I know they would often sit or lay side-by-side, talking or laughing or simply enjoying their freedom in silence, sometimes playing a game or coloring in an art book, until by unspoken mutual agreement my two little darlings would slowly climb the stairs back up to their shared bedroom, clamber into the bunk bed and return to their slumber, another Pal Night tucked under their belts.

Insert my sweet sigh here, "Sigh-h-h-h . . . " How can I follow that up? All I can possibly hope for is a continuance in some form or another of these pal nights, in various configurations of siblings, as the years propel my progeny ever forward. As wonderful as it is that they need me, need their father, it is infinitely more comforting to realize that they both need and desire the company and commentary of one another. Because only they, my trio of dark-haired, brown-eyed, strong-lung-ed lambies, share their particular common childhood. Only they are suited to almost-perfectly understand one another in regards to how their perceptions and ideas and feelings and emotions and memories came into being, varied and different though they may be. They were all under the same influences of their wildly woolly ma and their mildly mannered pa. They are bound, and thus, would be most blessed and encouraged in their lives' journeys to foster their relationships without restrictions of time and mood.