The house is a catastrophe of shoes, a mad explosion, as if all week we have been running in and taking them off, kicking them into corners and against furniture, only to grab a different pair on our way back out the door. Weeks like this, the house becomes less a refuge and more a way-point: fridge barren, plants screaming to be watered, laundry like a river in flood surging past the banks of its basket. It is like this with children, I suspect, only more so.

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This was intended to be a longer post, but the day went by in a blur, as sunny Sundays tend to do, and the time I had planned for blogging seems to have fallen away.

I’ll leave you with this thought. I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew when I was sixteen, people I haven’t spoken to in years. What I find fascinating isn’t how much they’ve changed. Rather, it’s how much of ourselves has already settled by the time we are sixteen, so that in talking to someone I knew so very long ago it’s almost possible to make believe it’s only one summer that has gone by.

Friendships are a funny thing. They are more like weeds than garden-flowers, surviving untended and unloved for years at a stretch, existing in the in-between places. And sometimes, they burst brightly and unexpectedly into bloom, setting entire fields ablaze in color.