Dear Reese,
I loved the song “If I Die Young” by The Band Perry when I was eighteen. It’s a good song, but as the title suggests, makes poetry out of a life cut short. Just the sort of thing my angsty heart would eat up.
Thirteen years later, a “Pt. 2” was released, same melody and chorus but verses that changed the meaning — “Now I know there's no such thing as enough time.” We listen to it while I towel you dry after your bath tonight and I hold you up to the mirror as we vibe with the lyrics in the second verse:
I'm looking more like my mother
I love her to the bone
I know it's gonna kill me on the day she goes home
I'll pour some holy water on the daughter of my own
I'll pass my name down 'fore it's on a headstone
It’s one of the moments where I feel the passage of time in the most incredible way. Eighteen-year-old me could have never envisioned this moment, this life that we have together. (There’s another cliché country song reference in here — thank goodness I didn’t get what I thought I wanted because now I have you).
After a day with just you, me, and MorMor at the cottage (all of us coughing, to a degree) it’s easy to be grateful as we play out slow Sunday moments. MorMor experiments with four different mixes of 5-grain bread. You take a walk-about of each room, lifting your belly up more and more. When you nap this afternoon you conk out in my arms and I watch episodes of Haikyu!! on my laptop while I hold you.
That’s it, darling, that’s the dream.
Love,
Mama