as it turns out

I significantly underestimated the sacredness of this space. though quite frankly, my underestimation looks more like forgetting and then remembering, forgetting and then remembering. back in may, the night before ezra graduated from high school, the subject of the butter came up. that is, the infamous tub of butter that went missing when ezra was just three years-old and mysteriously showed up a few days later inside a lidded pot (which was nestled behind a mess of many lidded pots in the very back of a kitchen cabinet so high up I needed a small step stool myself to reach it). surely ezra was the culprit, though it still seems impossible. we were never able to prove it or explain it and he doesn't remember (or, says he doesn't) and anyway, now it's as embedded in the family folklore as both birth stories, the time I put fake toilet paper in the bathroom and the crazy magic christmas of 2010. 

I remembered writing about the butter here and went looking for it in my archives that night. something else I underestimated: the unmitigated joy of reading old posts out loud to the humans you wrote about. one post led to another and before long, we were swimming in stories and details I had long since forgotten. I cannot explain what it felt like to read these pieces out loud to the kids for the first time. the kids, who are now 18 and 22. I cannot explain what it felt like in the room that night-- story after story, their joy, my joy. I cannot overstate this. and in writing this right now, I can feel how much I want to get it right, how tempted I am to overthink it, to leave this draft open and unpublished, to get up and do something else-- to check stupid dumb instagram, to reorganize the book shelves, to wash the three dishes in the sink-- something/anything to keep from thinking through/writing through this thing that happened that was so wonderfully deep and joyful though also strangely (inexplicably, ever so slightly) painful. I want to get it right and I don't think I can.

in a year, five years, maybe ten, I'll read this and remember. what I know now, after nearly eighteen years of blogging, is that this is all that really matters.