spring cleaning

It was the sort of tidy, unbelievable dream recounted in memoirs or told by children, hoping to chat up a subject when you know good and well they are fibbing, fabricating a neat narrative to start the day. I don't mind when my kids do it; let them be storytellers in a world that doesn't always like or understand big imaginations. It's a good cover.

But I woke with a start, after a vivid dream sure to make you roll your eyeballs around your sweet head, thinking this is your reward for reading Mama Milton - big fat liar - again. My feet hit the floor; I woke up productive

(Well, save the precious minutes lost, eating amaranth porridge, propped in my chair, watching Raquel Welch discuss her cleavage, or the need to be taken serious despite her cleavage or her tone or some such nonsense. Not that I don't like Raquel or her cleavage for that matter. But following what felt like a vision? Waste. Of. Time.)

The months that have made up this year have been equally difficult and happy: a fall out with a family member; meaningful work, subbing in a special ed classroom; the untimely death of a lost cousin; teaching my first Zumba class. I chase children, chores and choreography, only to collapse at night. I see an acupuncturist I adore, and she listens and cheers me on as I try to simultaneously regain my health and bite off more than I can chew most days.

Difficult and happy. Content and exhausted.

Just add the kids' birthdays, and Greg's busiest work season, and the billionth cold/pathogenic wind (see? love the Chinese medicine) and spring break found me a bit fried.

The house is quiet today. I have spoken to no one except Lowe's delivery service, promising to bring me a new stove by day's end. Soon, the kids will return from a visit with my parents to a house scoured with Comet and soap and water and hope. Orderly, or well on its way to being so.

We'll call it spring cleaning.

But secretly, you and I will remember it was the beginning of something new coming, unseen and welcome.