now is now

I just finished reading Little House in the Big Woods to Gabriel. That makes three times reading the book aloud as a parent, and at least once or twice silently as a child. And every time the last chapter takes me and holds me completely in its quiet grasp, so hushed and reverent is its tone. Pa tells the girls why there is no fresh meat today: he had been unable to shoot the animals he went out to hunt the night before. They were too wild and free and beautiful in the moonlight to kill. Then he puts the girls to bed and takes out his fiddle. He sings Auld Lang Syne, and explains to sleepy Laura that the days of auld lang syne are the days of long ago.

Frances just loaded pictures from the hand-me-down camera she's been using over the past months into the computer. I love to see the images my kids capture. A hundred pictures of Grandma's dog. Mama in the kitchen. Intimate shots of stuffed animals and beloved pieces of jewelry. Gabriel loves to take close-ups of eyes on my phone. He does fabulous portraits of adult mid-sections.

Frances took a video, unbeknownst to me, of the mother of one of Gabriel's friends telling me about a family trip, while I nursed Beatrice and nodded and made sympathetic noises. It was so strange to see the exchange through her eyes. What are the nows - the experiences, the images, the feelings - that will lodge inside my children and live always there? My soft middle in a hug? The feel of each others' legs flopped over one another in summertime? The heat and smell of Beatrice's milky breath?

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.