Tenderness

Once there was a woman who lived in a house with three small boys.

Two dogs. One cat.

One husband and lots of pots and pans, spice jars,

geranium plants and obligatory cobwebs.

The woman believed that time would stand still in the house and because

of that never dared to consider the future.

All she ever thought about was the here and now and the three small boys

sitting around the pine table and the two dogs lying on the floor and the

cat stretched out on the windowsill, the red geraniums and the spice jars

that, now and then, needed to be replenished.

Why even the howling winds that rattled the house

throughout the long dark winter days did not distract the woman from

the cosy bubble of the world she had created.

But time managed to pass as it always does and it was only when she saw

how new

beds were needed for her three small boys that she began to realise and

accept that things were changing.

She noticed how the voices of the three small boys were changing

too and often, when she was sure she heard men talking down the hall and

wondered who had come to visit, did she come to realise that they, the

mature voices, were

actually

the voices of her three small boys.

Once but to be honest more than several times, she forbid a tear to fall

down her cheek when she

found that she had to look up at her boys rather than down and she

wondered then how she had not noticed the years pass this swiftly

and smoothly and that it was akin to flour being passed through a sieve.

What was more surprising to the woman is that she believed she had not

changed at all. Her voice still sounded the same. Her bed still fit her.

She still watered the geraniums, refilled the cinnamon jars and sang

and danced with the same spontaneity as she had done when the

three small boys looked up at her.

Though there was, of course, a change in her too, she just couldn’t see it.

Overtime the woman accepted the time passing but

that didn’t mean she still could not see the past as clearly as the

present. Her love for her children was the same and they began to

return it in kind.

There was a difference though. One small detail. One that

stood out and that was how now when ever the three small boys looked

down at her and hugged her, they hung on a little bit longer. they held

her with a conviction, like it mattered and the woman with the three small

boys felt a great tenderness from them like a warm cloak of life wrapping

itself around her in rich layers of midnight blue velvet sprinkled with

yellow stars and small

but golden secrets whispered in hushed wheat, wrapped up in

impossible dreams.