Early learning

"It's a miracle!" Bennett says when he sees the new plastic juice container in the bathtub. I'd rinsed it out earlier in the day and added it to his growing collection. To me, they look like so much advertising and used-up packaging, with the name-brand of the juice spelled out across a basket of fruit and banners promising "100% Juice!" and "Vitamin-C!"

Briefly, I wonder where he learned the phrase, "It's a miracle!" Miracles, for me, are like the 11 on a scale of 1-10. I save the term in reserve for the extra-special.

Bennett lifts one of the containers, looking at the words. Lately, he's begun noticing that letters are everywhere. He knows they mean something, but he's not sure what. He points and guesses, "O? M? H?" and then his fallback, "B?" Each time I shake my head no, he gets a little more crestfallen. I hug him and suggest we work together to learn the words, but he wriggles out of my arms and says seriously, "No, mommy, no letters, no."

I know how he feels: drawn to something, and yet ambiguous about what that something might mean to your life; uncertain about all the changes that are sure to follow, if you embrace it. Like now, in our new, old house with it's creaky floorboards and the loud, surprising swoosh! as the snow slides in great sheets from the metal roof.

It's all new territory to me--I can't immediately remember which kitchen drawer holds the spoons and forks, or which cupboard has the salt and pepper. The cupboards are handmade of pine, smoothed with age and use. There are shallow cups scooped out behind each drawer-pull from dozens of years of fingers touching the same spot, over and over. The drawer-pulls themselves, made from wrought iron, are shiny silver where they've been used most often.

Inside the cupboards, each face of the shelf-front has been decorated with meticulous cut-outs of paper pictures of fruit in a pattern: apples, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, plums. Someone loved this kitchen, once. A woman who saved old kids' jeans and buttons and flannel shirts, who kept a giant quilting loop hanging from a bent clothes hanger in the cellar. A woman who cut out each tiny apple, each bunch of grapes, then glued them to her cupboards where no one but her would see them. Who was she, and could she be me?

I keep circling it, just as Bennett circles the idea of learning to read--the feeling that if I embrace this life, I will become someone different, another kind of woman. And I wonder, will I like her better, or worse, than who I am now?

Later in the day, Bennett returns to his questions. He asks about the letters on the blanket across the back of the couch. I remember them only vaguely; my mind is tired and wandering. Pendleton, maybe, or Woolrich, but I can't make them out, because we are too close. I tell Bennett we're too close to see what they mean.

As I say it aloud, I realize that's exactly how I feel about my life, these days. I'm only able to see the moment; only able to see the black curve bumping up against itself, then looping back around the way it came, which leaves me thinking, Where are we going? It's only later that I can say, Ah, now I see it. It was there all along: lowercase e!

And I remember other instances when my children and I stood on the threshold of change, uncertain of the outcome. Nights of broken sleep, tears over the wrong kind of jam on the toast or the red mittens instead of the blue, like it was with potty training, or before that, talking. Even earlier, walking. So many changes, all of them now a comfortable part of the fabric of our lives. No wonder I sometimes forget that in the beginning, each step forward feels like a new frontier.

I try again to see Bennett's life through his 4-year-old eyes. To him, a plastic juice container is a miracle, with its bright colors and the pretty shapes of the kiwis and strawberries, the grapes and apples and raspberries. And there is the usefulness of a plastic container, especially in a bathtub full of water. It wasn't so long ago, really, that he mastered the art of pouring.

Maybe Bennett is right. I shouldn't hold it in reserve for special occasions: I should say it often and freely about the thousand things that occur every day that I've been too close to see. It's all miraculous; there are miracles all around us.

(This post is dedicated to Claudia, who faces her own new frontier, and who has always been good at recognizing miracles.)