We've lived in this (new to us) old log house, in a little cup of a valley, surrounded by jack pines and juniper and red willow and wind, for 4 months already.

I think of all the places I've lived for even less time; moved in, looked around, saw the sites, and said, Okay! Time to shove off! Basement apartments in college, a rickety old pink house with a hole in the floorboards in graduate school. Nicer places, too: a condo high on an aspen-covered hillside in Breckenridge, Colorado, or any vacation, when you reach the point where the sun and the sand and the surf all seem so, I don't know, Ho-hum. Time to be going!

But here, 4 months feels as if we're just beginning. Green shoots are poking up through last year's dry yellow grass and soon the hillsides will be a carpet of color. Everything is waking up--the lilacs, full of thick buds; the rhubarb behind the fuel oil tank; the wild strawberries on the hill behind the house; the naturalized poppies, a riot of orange right out the front door

From the kitchen window I can see these things and more: fat, red-breasted Robins and dark-hooded Juncos and Bluebirds flitting from the tops of fence posts to willow branches to a single blade of tall grass. Never before have I seen such a blue: unexpected, unbelievable. So blue your mind can't take it in, but there it is. The bluest of blue.

It's exactly the way it is with my children. I used to think I wanted to race through all the stages that I wasn't particularly good at: the sleeplessness, the near-constant feedings. Or the teething and the fussing. Or the No! Stage, which some people call the Terrific Twos but I'm not one of those people; for us, it began at 18 months and really, who am I kidding, it's still going on with the little boys, depending upon the mood of the day.

I don't feel that way, anymore. I want everything to stay a little longer. Like this new country that we're in: it seems as if just when I get to know my way around, something changes. Always, change.

I'm terrible at laundry. It's an unfortunate combination of lack of focus and bad luck that can't be helped. I washed a brown crayon once, and it melted in the dryer so that all the clothes came out with brown streaks across them. But I didn't realize this, of course, until my children were actually wearing the brown-streaked clothes and we'd already driven to town. I kept apologizing everywhere we went, saying, "They're clean clothes, really!"

Most recently, everything turned blue. Blue sheets, blue towels, blue socks. Blue, in my load of whites. It wasn't what I was hoping for. The blue wasn't the thing we were after. The blue wasn't white, or fresh, or clean. The blue was the last straw.

Carter, my oldest son, said, "Mom, my underwear is blue."

"I see that," I said.

"They're really blue! And so are my socks!"

"I know," I said, preparing myself for the worst--the recrimination, the blame. I was ready with my excuses; about the long hours I spent doing laundry--about the unfairness of how a single blue flannel pillowcase tossed, inexplicably, in the wash could ruin everything--but I didn't need them.

"I love it! " he said. "They're my lucky underpants!"

And just like that, I'm reminded of why I love 9--the power of a 9-year-old to see the good in everything. I want to stay here. I want to have a 9-year-old for at least 10 more years. And even as I wish this and know it's impossible, I realize that all I really want is for our lives to slow down.

I don't know why I used to be in such a hurry; why I wanted to pass through my life as quickly as possible. Couldn't I see what I was missing?

Here's more proof of why I love 9: Carter explained to me the best way to climb a tree. This is exactly what he said: "Begin at the broken branch. Try to find the pathway. Look ahead, so you can see where you're going, but look back too, so you know where you've been. Go until you reach a clearing, an open spot where you can see blue sky. Then you know you're there. Settle in, and enjoy the view."

The checkout lady in the grocery store notices that I've bought every brown banana on discount, every bag of wrinkled mushrooms or bruised tomatoes or yellow squash just about to turn, plus every item in the sale flier including a half-gallon of ice cream.

"Three boys," I shrug.

Once upon a time I'd feel the need to explain, going into great detail about the whole thing: twins, preemies, Down syndrome (which always prompts raised eyebrows, "Twins? And one with Down syndrome?"). And I'd want to mention my oldest boy too, Carter, not to leave him out. And on and on until finally, I made myself sick with it. Who cares?! There's a woman in the line behind me with a half-gallon of skim milk and she's tapping her foot impatiently and I need to get going, already.

"Three boys," I say, and leave it at that. It's the only fact of us that matters in the grocery store check-out line. My boys, eating up all the milk and bananas and whole wheat bread this little store has to offer. I imagine the clerk, the week we came to town, noticing us without really knowing it was us; thinking, Wow! We're sure going through a lot of milk these days! And bread, too! I can't restock fast enough.

These are the small ripples of our circle of influence. At the post office, too--the packages and letters addressed to the boys (extra work!), or Tom's magazines that were so ordinary at home; now, when hand-delivered by the salt-of-the-earth postmaster, they seem frivolous and wasteful.

The same life, seen through a different lens.

I have a friend who is also a mother to a child with Down syndrome. Their family recently moved into a new neighborhood. She found herself, for the first time ever, feeling shy. She didn't know why the neighbors seemed distant. Was it because she spent the work week at a busy office in a nearby city? Was it that her husband stayed at home with their children? Was it the Down syndrome?

I didn't know what to tell her. There are so many ways we divide ourselves up, as parents. Working in the home, or out of the home? Nanny? Daycare? Discipline? Vaccinations? Television? How about cloth or disposables?

And even within the special needs community: how much early intervention are you getting? When did you start? What kind of doctor do you have--DS specialist, pediatrician, or regular old GP? Ear tubes or not? Tonsils, in or out? What about the vitamins?

My friend with the child with Down syndrome isn't just worried about her new community; when she asks about her situation, I see that she's asking about the bigger things in her life: is it wrong for her to love her job so much; will she find good friends in her new neighborhood; was it a mistake to move? And the big one: will her family be judged because of her child's extra chromosome? I know what these things feel like, because I've felt them all at one time or another, too.

The grocery store's sale on ice cream included Neapolitan, which seems to have been created especially for my boys, who each love one kind the best. After dinner but before baths, in that quiet time of the evening when no one is too tired and no one is hyper, I plan to surprise them. I'll scoop the ice cream into the glass dishes from the second-hand store, and it will feel like a little party.

It's one small thing I can do, my little circle of influence. A dish of ice cream and the whole world's troubles melt away. Smiles and happy, milky faces. Strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, each boy gets his own favorite. And for myself, it's impossible to choose. I want a little taste of each--like my boys, all different and perfect at the very same time.

Last week we got a puppy.

One of the boys' favorite books is Audrey Wood's The Napping House. In it, a peaceful, sleeping house is transformed by a flea, a wakeful flea! And us, too. We've been transformed by 10 pounds of wiggling puppiness.

He's part Border Collie, part Australian Shepherd, and part Blue Heeler. In other words, a tremendous combination of instinct and temperament for herding sheep or cattle. But what we have instead of ducks or geese or lambs or calves, are 3 young boys with no desire to be held in a bunch or pushed through a gate.

It doesn't help matters that we can't decide on a name. Max? Sam? Jack? Bad Dog?

We'd had a difficult enough time choosing a name for our children: we are the parents who named their twins based on a remark by our ultrasound technician, who explained that for clarity, the babies would be referred to as Baby A and Baby B throughout the pregnancy. My husband Tom and I took that protocol to heart, and named our boys Avery and Bennett.

When we picked up the puppy, we made the exchange at a gas station on the side of the highway. He was in the back seat, on a blue tarp, and had vomited from car sickness. The woman meeting us held in her arms a young, dimpled baby. I asked hopefully, "Does he have a name?" The woman thought I meant her baby; I was asking about the dog.

Having a puppy in the house reminds me of the few facts I know about toddlers: that they have a particular, focused type of willpower that makes my own seem like a pale, wilted thing; that they have the cunning and intelligence to get themselves into trouble, but haven't yet developed the ability to get out of it; that you can pack a lot of running and jumping and hopping and eating and pooping into a single day, if you put your mind to it.

I'm reminded too of a parenting site I found when my first son Carter was little. There, I learned that small children are better able to respond to commands telling them what they should do, as opposed to what they shouldn't do. I finally realized this after a long morning of yelling, "NobitenobitenobiteNO!nobarknojump...YOU! GO LIE DOWN!"

The puppy is black and white and a shade of gray that looks blue in the sunlight. He let out his first bark and it sounded like the call of a lovesick rooster, or a beginner's attempt at yodeling. He chews the kids' rubber rain boots, the gloves, the Legos and the Imaginext Battle Castle, even the flashcards.

Avery calls him "baby." When the puppy ruins their toys, Avery says, "Baby time out." Or, "Baby nap time." He follows the puppy around the house and I hear him issuing reprimands: No! No! My sweet Avery, now the bossy one. Who would have guessed it?

Avery has always been the smallest, and he was the last to learn to walk and talk, because he has Down syndrome. Though he's the middle child, in many ways we treat him like the baby of the family. The puppy has changed the pecking order around here: Avery is no longer on the bottom.

At night, the puppy sleeps on each of the boys' beds, taking turns. If I wake, as I sometimes do, and wander from room to room, ending in the kitchen (making sure the stove is off) to the back door (double checking), sometimes even taking a step outside to look at the stars, the puppy climbs down from the warm piles of comforters and covers and sleeping boys, and follows me. When I return to my own bed, he puts his head in my lap and looks up at me with his golden eyes and my heart melts.

There will be no more babies for us. Once, this thought would have sent me to tears, but no longer. I'm happy with the size and shape of our family, each member as important and essential as another. We fit together like pieces of a puzzle, the picture of our lives becoming more and more clear with each passing day.

This is the season of puppies and little boys, a time that is not quite bottles and diapers, but puppy chow and tiny piddle stains hidden in corners. We settle on a name: Bailey. Avery still calls him Baby, but it's close enough that nobody seems to mind.

Bennett and I are sitting at the kitchen table holding hands. I glance idly at the log walls around us, the yellowing 1940s linoleum floor, the peeling wallpaper above the sink. It's the middle of the night. I haven't been up with this child, alone in a sleeping house, in a long while.

He was the baby who cried all the time; he was the one whose face contorted in pain for no reason I could recognize, or cure. He was the baby who caused me to try a wheat-free, dairy-free diet; the one who sent me searching for soy formula and homeopathic tablets, when everything else failed to bring him relief.

Finally, exhausted and out of options, I made an emergency appointment. I remember the scene: Bennett, wrapped in the baby blanket knit by his grandmother, and me waiting together in a supply closet to see our family doctor, who fit us in because (I'm convinced) of the panic he heard in my voice. "A baby shouldn't cry this much," I'd said over the phone, nearly in tears.

The hasty, supply-closet visit brought a referral to a pediatric surgeon named Dr. Anne, who diagnosed an umbilical hernia in need of immediate repair. I remember how small Bennett looked as the nurses wheeled him away from me, bare except for an impossibly tiny diaper. So much had already happened--twins, an early delivery, Avery's diagnosis. Avery's apnea/bradycardia, and now surgery for Bennett. I knew more about NICUs and PICUs and hospitals than I ever thought possible.

After Bennett's surgery, Dr. Anne came into recovery to speak with me. She had a British accent and wore a perfect string of pearls beneath her blue-green scrubs. As she explained what to expect next, Bennett's pulse-ox alarm went off.

"He's going to (BEEP) then you want to (BEEP) and the rest will be (BEEP)..."

I looked around, anxious and distracted. Where were the nurses? (BEEP). Why doesn't the doctor fix the machine? (BEEP). I looked at the alarm. It's meant to alert you whenever a baby's oxygen levels dip too low; it also goes off, I'd learned, whenever the baby wiggles and the toe clamp comes loose, which was what had happened. I asked the doctor, "Do you mind if I reset the pulse-ox?"

She nodded and laughed and said, "You know too much!"

She was right--I knew too much, more than I'd ever imagined. But I was no different than any of the other parents who were my companions in this new country: the country of canulas and g-tubes and breathing treatments, of IVs and pulse-ox machines and stainless steel cribs.

We follow our children where they lead us.

So tonight, sitting beneath the single bulb of the kitchen light, I regard Bennett. There is a spot of blood on his pajama top, and another on his leg. His fingers are smeared with red, and there are a dozen white tissues tinged crimson scattered across the table. To an outsider, it might look like a crime scene. But the truth is much less sinister--it's just a child with a bloody nose.

"And when I woke up?" Bennett says. "And there was something coming out of my nose? It was blood! It was so scary. I was very brave."

"Yes," I say. "You were very brave and you were very strong."

"I should have a jelly bean," he says. "A jelly bean for being brave."

Bennett has an insatiable sweet tooth, and though his request breaks the few meager rules I try to enforce about candy only after dinner, and about brushing your teeth before bed, and about trying to choose a strawberry or an apple or a pear instead, I nod yes.

I go to the cupboard and take down the jar filled with left-over Easter candy. I set it on the table between us and in the overhead light, the candy glows. I watch the tension and fear leave his face, replaced by excitement. "One for me," he says, "and one for you, too."

I dole out the jelly beans. This small, quiet crisis is nothing compared to the big things that could happen, that have happened. But I take my jelly bean and pop it into my mouth anyway. Because being a parent is not for the faint of heart, even on the best days. This is how we go: listening to each other, nodding our heads in recognition, holding hands through the night.

"It must be like feeling happy and sick to your stomach at the same time," said my neighbor, the man with the chickens in his yard, Aconas and Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds whose eggs have yolks the color of the sun.

He could have been talking about so many things, really: the double blue line on the little plastic stick with my first pregnancy, or learning with the second that we were going to have twins. Each of my babies, taking that first step away from me, toward a new world of walking and eventually running and before you know it, they're grown and gone to college.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The happy/sick feeling, this time, is because my book is making its way through cyberspace on an Internet book tour. The book I wrote is about my life as Avery's mother, and because being his mother isn't separate from any other part of my life, it's about his brothers, too, and my husband Tom and his parents and my parents and even my friends, who did nothing to deserve this sort of thing other than be so funny and wise and generous that I wanted to write about them.

Here I am, hanging out our dirty laundry, one piece at a time. The guilt after Avery's diagnosis and through most of the first year? Put it on the line. How about the grief and the sadness? Hang them like a matching pair of socks. Ignorance, fear, prejudice? Out on the line too, flapping in the breeze for all the world to see.

There are other things to air: happiness so bright and bold I'm afraid putting it in the sun will make it fade. Or the baby clothes--sweet, precious onsies so small I worry that if I put them out in the open, the wind will carry them away. All my maternity clothes, and the nursing tops with complicated closures. It's all out there now, every last thing.

"But you wrote a book!" you say. "Surely, you must have thought it would be read someday." And it's true, I did think about it, but only a little bit. In my mind, I had one reader. She was a mother with a new baby on her chest, sitting in a rocking chair. The baby was sleeping, the house was quiet, and the lights were dim. She didn't have a laptop, or email, or me, just a few keystrokes away.

People write and say, "Congratulations!" and "Enjoy!" and "You deserve it!" But in my heart, I know differently: I don't deserve it. And that's what makes it so complicated.

When the twins were barely home from the NICU, and our life still seemed like a ship with a giant cannon hole blasted through the middle, I'd find myself trying, very hard, to find a reason for it. Could it be this? Could it be that? What was the purpose? What, exactly, was the point?

I remember Tom sitting me down on the couch, taking my hands in his, and very gently saying, "The problem is you think life is fair. Life is not fair. It's not fair and it's not easy. But life is good."

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. I'd been walking around with the scales of justice hanging from my neck, trying to balance one thing with another--a little more on the left! Whoops! Right, right, go right! It was too big of a job, this cosmic keeping-track, and Tom's words allowed me to put down the burden. I accepted it: life is not fair.

And now that my dirty laundry is hanging out on the line, instead of being judged (Your whites look a little dingy, or, You really could have used a stain stick) something else is happening, over and over and over again. Emails saying things like, "I did the same thing!" and "I know exactly what you mean!" and even, "I felt that way too, in the beginning." So much good will, so much kindness, so much support.

I was ready to accept that life isn't fair in the hard sense of it--that some children don't have parents who love them and that not everyone gets enough to eat every night and that a microscopic dot of extra genetic material had changed the course of my son's life as I'd imagined it, forever.

But I didn't know about the goodness, the love and joy that could radiate for no reason other than the sun is out. I am a woman alone, hanging her wash to dry, until you all joined me. You stood alongside me and began pinning up your own things and when you did, forgiveness streamed through the clouds like sunshine.

Thank you.

Four-year-old Bennett is lounging in the over-sized cast iron bathtub, which is one of the very best things about the old log house we've been living in. His twin, Avery, decides that he wants to get in the tub with Bennett, and I hear Bennett say, "Woah, Woah, Woah! Close the door, you're letting out the stinky heat!"

It's actually something I've heard myself say, but when I say it, it's steamy heat.

Nonplussed by Bennett's orders, Avery walks into the bathroom and begins undressing, so that he can climb in. When Bennett protests, "Mom! Avery's being mean!" Avery replies with his newest favorite phrase, the linguistic equivalent of an answer, a brush-off, and a joke all-in-one. In other words, a one-liner.

"Oh, poo-poo!" he says.

It's a new thing for Avery. Unlike Bennett's stinky heat, I don't think Avery learned it from me, or anyone we know. The phrase is his own creation, and he uses it perfectly. When I say, "Avery, please pick up your sweater," or "Avery, time to put the toys away," or even, "Avery, eat your peas!" out it comes. "Oh, poo-poo!"

I don't remember the first time he said it. I'm sure that we all laughed, happy and surprised--Avery frequently chooses to use sign language, and he doesn't often speak more than one syllable at a time. Too, Avery says it in a particularly humorous way. (Unlike his brother Bennett, who's still working on timing and delivery, particularly with his knock-knock jokes, which usually go something like this: "Knock-knock!" "Who's there?" "A man! With a hat!")

Avery's timing is impeccable, and there's something inherently funny about his little cherubic face (he's about the size of your average 2-year-old) saying something so naughty (a 2-year-old with 4 years experience, as my husband Tom says.)

And now comes the hard part: Avery's had his joke, again and again. He's surprised all of us, and the neighbor down the road, and the grocery clerk at the checkout stand, and the librarian. It's all well and good, until I stop to think about it. I wouldn't allow it from my other 2 kids. Why should I allow this kind of talk from Avery?

When Avery was just a baby, and we learned that he had Down syndrome, the books about raising twins, stacked next to my bedside in a leaning tower, were slowly replaced with books about Down syndrome. I learned that for many reasons, varied and complicated, speech might be a challenge for my child.

Things like the fact that Avery's head-size is smaller, which means he has a smaller mouth, but a normal-sized tongue inside it, so there's less room to make words. Or, his smaller ears might make it more difficult for him to hear the sounds of speech. Or, the part of his brain that controls speech might be affected by his trisomy, and its biochemistry.

Despite all these reasons, it's one of the things I wanted most: I wanted to be able to talk to Avery, and have him talk to me. I figured once we could do that, he could teach me what it means to have Down syndrome, and I could finally put all the books away.

So when Bennett's first words came (mama, dada, and wow!) but Avery's did not, we began speech therapy. (Avery was about 11 months; I later learned we could have begun even sooner, and worked on things like feeding techniques and oral-motor stimulation).

We blew bubbles to encourage development of the muscles around his mouth and encourage breath control, and we sipped pudding through a straw for the same reasons. We played kazoos and harmonicas and blew party horns. We sang songs and did finger plays and learned the signs for more and thirsty and eat; play and read and sleep. We did all these things, week after week, and yet never once did I imagine the possibility of the poo-poo talk, or what I might do about it.

It's tricky, this trying to decide what is right and fair when it comes to Avery. It's like baking a cake without a recipe: how much to allow for his prematurity? How much is twinship? What about being the middle child? Adding in, of course, personality? How do you measure Down syndrome?

Which isn't, in the end, so terribly different from what we do for all our children. A mother's eye is like a prism: seeing at once a dozen versions of her child--the future, the past, the best hopes and highest potential standing right beside our darkest suspicions and deepest fears. We do what we can, trying to strengthen the weak spots and build up the good, and it doesn't always make sense to anyone else but us. I suppose that's why it's called "a mother's intuition."

I know what I need to do. I will sit down with Avery, and explain to him that "poo poo" is funny but only sometimes, and mostly in the bathroom. That he's a wonderful boy with a good sense of humor and that we can find other things that make people laugh, too. That not only do I believe this of him; from now on, I expect it.

I was recently speaking with my friend Sheri about how ordinary my life is, most days, and how surprising this is to me. But I included the disclaimer, "If you accept physical therapy and speech therapy as normal (which by then, I did: speech therapy felt to me like a really talkative play date, and physical therapy reminded me of Kindermusic classes, only with less singing.)"

As soon as I said it, I felt bad about it because of likening my experiences with therapies to typical-kid things, which is a very, very shorthand way of referring to them, and it circumvents all the time and emotional energy it took me to reach that conclusion. In the end, I did feel that way, but not in the beginning. I think that's why so many parents refer to parenthood as a journey: because you don't end up in the same place, emotionally speaking, that you started out.

When we first began the Early Intervention process with Avery, I was skeptical. I wasn't sure that all the paperwork and the forms, the bright toys and the early morning appointments, the diagrams and the books with titles like "Gross Motor Skills" and "Early Communication Skills" would help us. In fact, it all seemed like a great, big distraction from what I saw as the central fact of our lives--that nothing would ever be the same again.

And part of me was angry; I resented having to to these things (therapy always seemed to be scheduled in the middle of nap time, and no one had a good answer for what I should do with Avery's twin, Bennett, who was very interested in all the shiny new toys, but who wasn't supposed to play with them because they were for Avery.)

So my regret over making the statement about speech therapy and physical therapy may seem like a small issue, but it's an important one to me, because if there is a mom somewhere out there thinking that she doesn't feel like therapies are exaggerated play dates--the bubbles! the kazoos! pudding through a straw!--or a loud variation of Mommy and Me (I'm thinking here of finger plays and Ring-Around-the-Rosie and the tiny, child-sized trampoline) then I've missed the point. I don't want to cause anyone to doubt themselves, or their experiences. I only mean to encourage dialog about this kind of parenting, which is as full of ups and downs as anything I've known.

My experience is with a healthy child who has Down syndrome. Not every child with Down syndrome is healthy: sometimes children face heart surgery or other procedures, sometimes there is leukemia. These experiences include the landscapes of NICUs and PICUs, words like recovery and remission. Our stories intersect, overlap, but no two are exactly the same, and a story about Down syndrome isn't necessarily a story about any of these other things.

I want to talk about grief, too. In the beginning--that hot, smoky June when our diagnosis was still fresh and raw--I hauled myself down the twisty road that leads from our house to the shores of a freshwater lake and there, alone for the first time in the day, I cried and cried, flooding the bay with my salty tears, so many that I probably altered the lake's ecological chain. That summer, I spoke the language of loss, understood all the shades of gray.

But my grief grew away from me. Like my tears that slowly, eventually, finally became part of the rest of the lake, life absorbed my sadness. I began to see that there was so much else to do, besides cry; there were many more colors in my crayon box than gray.

And of course, I can't speak for anyone else but myself. But I came to feel that grief was a disservice, a way of dishonoring my son and all that he is, and my other children, and my husband Tom, and the people who loved and supported us, including the therapists, who spent their days working with our remarkable children. And the great big ball of the sun, brazen and gold, that kept rising every morning, even despite the fact that it would only, ultimately sink. It was time for me to rise again, too.

I've never done this before--lived in a windy place.

The wind begins, as I imagine it, at the tippy-top of the perpetually snow-covered Crazy Mountains, which are also sometimes called the Crazy Woman Mountains. I like just saying it: I live at the base of the Crazy Woman Mountains. It's like having a dangerous relative, or a wild past--dropping it into a conversation gives people pause. It helps me remember there's more than what there appears to be; there's always more to the story.

The wind comes from high up in the mountains, where there are no trees and hardly any birds and mostly just loose, sharp rocks called scree and snow, lots of snow. It's a swirling sort of wind, blowing down and out, colliding with the moisture-rich air of the valley that smells of wood smoke and oil-burning stoves and even cows. I like to think of it; the wind mingling with the breath of all of us, the farmers and ranchers down in the valley, the cows and horses too, elk and wolves and mule deer and whitetail and antelope. The breath of my dog and cat, even my children.

When it reaches our little spot--the cupped meadow of pale, yellow grasses, surrounded on 3 sides by high, tree-lined ridges--the wind sounds like the ocean. It blows through the tall grasses, the jack-pines and the firs, the old wire fence and the willows along the creek, everything swaying to a new kind of harmony, all of it strange to me and also absolutely, deeply familiar.

I sometimes wonder what the wind means--Native American lore (the Crow lived here once) and local knowledge refer to it often, but there is nothing more than this: wind means change. High pressure to low, low pressure to high. Simply put, when the wind blows, change is in the air.

The wind pushes itself down around the old log cabin and through the cracks in the chinking, some of them stuffed with old flannel shirts, or red fabric, or in one corner, a plastic bag. I can feel it then, a coolness that I lift my face toward. My windy life.

I'm done having babies, and none of my friends or family have babies anymore. There are no more toddlers, either: what we have are little boys. It doesn't take much imagination to see my oldest son Carter, 9, and realize that shortly, much too shortly, he will be in his own world, a world of his choosing, and he will be gone. His twin brothers are soon to follow. Our time together is so small that I should be able to measure it, existentially speaking, in the blink of an eye.

When I was a new mom to Carter, I remember with such clarity saying goodbye to all my favorite parts of myself: books, solitude, writing. Contemplation, conversation, sleep. Most of all, sleep. I missed my deep blue sleep.

But slowly, I found new favorite parts of myself: watching the sun rise with a baby rocking in my arms, singing made-up lullabies, the way my kisses could heal any hurt. Reading, but instead of novels, my days filled with the artful wonder of children's books. Telling ridiculous knock-knock jokes, learning to see the beauty of a Garter snake. These were surprising and joyful discoveries, brought to me by my children.

And now, the winds of change. When I think of my children going, I think about how bare my life was, really, before I knew them. I think about how one-dimensional it was, how selfish and self-centered (I didn't know there was any other way, until they showed me). Mostly, I think about how much I will miss them.

So is this what parenthood is, then? The changing wind? Learning to lean into it, letting it wash over me? Even, seeking it out? Again, I'm reminded of the ocean, my Pacific, the water I loved as a child. I remember playing in it, tumbling in it, finding my place in the rise and fall of the tides. Knowing that is was the way of things, and not only accepting it, but embracing it.

It's one of those afternoons when the snow is spitting from the sky, the clouds are hanging low and gray, and the hours seem to pass at a crawl. I have a phrase from a long-ago song running through my head, "Mama said there'd be days like this..."

Avery is wearing his lion costume and roaring at everyone; Bennett is hiding behind the couch, springing out at me and shouting "Ha! Did I scare you?" and Carter is moping. There are 3 jars of open applesauce in the fridge because at lunch, everyone needed their own, private applesauce.

Privacy is a new concept around here, especially when it comes to Mommy. I say this because of things like little boys pounding at the door when I'm in the bathroom, or waking me up in the middle of the night because someone is thirsty, or someone else just remembered that the blue wooden train is under the bed, and could they have it, right now? Things like tugging at my sleeve when I'm on the telephone, or stretching out across my lap when I'm working at the computer, which always reminds me of the heroine in silent films, as she lies across the train tracks, serious, melodramatic, with a hand raised to her forehead.

And I indulge them; I allow it. We're living in the old log house; we have new schedules; everything is still fresh and slightly unsettling--the creaky floorboards ("Spooky!" Carter says), the lingering smell of kitchen grease (Still! After weeks of scrubbing!). Even I feel it: the house belongs to someone else, and we are strangers here. As a result, my free time, and my privacy, has mostly disappeared. Our family dial has been tuned to the all-mommy, all-the-time channel.

Bennett, at 4-years-old, is beginning to understand that I have another name besides Mommy. He asks me about it, just to make sure nothing has changed: "Your name is Jennifer?!" he'll say, half-question, half-statement. Or sometimes, instead of Daddy, he'll say, "Tom?" which upsets Tom. The only way I can ensure that Tom is called Daddy is to call him Daddy myself, which feels a bit silly and awkward to me, but it isn't the first time motherhood has called me to do things that in my previous, non-mommy life seemed unbelievable.

It's a day to be warned about, a day like this. Bennett is fussy and complaining, but he has good reason. Avery snatches whatever toy Bennett finds, until he's nearly in tears with frustration. Carter utters a phrase I remember from my own childhood: "Mom," (pronounced as 2, drawn-out syllables, its own kind of song), "Bennett touched me!"

If our family were a rubber band, we are stretched; pulling against each other and away from each other to the point of snapping. I respond by putting the children in separate rooms: Bennett goes upstairs in the bedroom to play with the train set; Avery is at the kitchen table, coloring; Carter has a choice. Kindness to his brothers, or spelling words. For the time being, he chooses spelling words.

And so the rest of the day settles around us, each of the children in their own little worlds. I am the space ranger floating among them, adding a train tunnel here, picking up a stray crayon there, pointing out that i most often comes before e, except after c. Everyone lays their own track, draws their own house, writes their own story, each eating applesauce from his own private cup.

Until all this privacy gets the better of them. Bennett is first, climbing down from upstairs, asking, "Where's AE?" Carter is next, putting away his notepad and following the sound of my voice to the family room, where Bennett and Avery and I are looking at Stellaluna.

"Bat," Avery says, pointing to the picture.

"Mom, Avery read his first word!" Carter says, proud and full of excitement and perhaps misinterpreting the meaning of the word reading just a little bit. I don't correct him. Instead, I soak it in--the harmony, the happiness. The flip side of privacy, which is community. Or even, family.

And just like that, we've sprung back together; no longer strained and tight, but loose and comfortable, easy, better, even, for having stretched.

Lately, I have a little mama-crush on my middle son Avery.

I love his tiny bottom, his long thin feet. I love his extra-soft skin. I love his blue eyes that have little flecks of white in them like stars. I love his nose, small and button-like and very perfect for kissing. I love how he crinkles his nose when I try to kiss him, he's a big boy, after all. And I love how he sometimes still curls into me, even though he is a big boy, when he's sick or scared or sleepy.

Avery is 4. He's my best sleeper. He's potty trained. He feeds himself. He's learning the letters of the alphabet and his numbers 1-5. He's a quiet boy: he speaks using sign language about half the time, and words the other times. He used to call me mama, now, like his brothers, he calls me mom. "Mom," he'll say, to get my attention, then he'll sign what he wants.

Thirsty, or juice, or hungry. He sometimes signs ice cream because he knows I'll say, "No, wait until after supper," then he laughs, because I've done what he expected. I'm always tempted to say, "Yes!" just to see the wide startle in his deep blue eyes, but ice cream isn't a thing to joke about at my house.

Being Avery's mom hasn't made me more, or better, accustomed to other people with disabilities, I recently realized. I was in the local thrift store and a middle-aged man came over to me and told me it was his birthday. He told me he was going to be 42.

He was dressed as you'd expect a man to be in this part of the country: jeans and a flannel shirt and winter boots and a coat. His hair was combed and his face was clean-shaven. I said, "Happy Birthday!" to him in my loud voice, the one I use when the kids aren't paying attention to me, and I spoke slowly, just like I used to do before I was Avery's mom. I wondered, later, why I did that.

And too, I indulged him. I agreed with what he was saying, but I wasn't really listening. I didn't stop sliding the hangers of boys' jeans across the rack, didn't pause and introduce myself. I didn't tell him I had a son named Avery who has Down syndrome.

He left the store, then I did. He held the door open for me and I said, "Thank you," hoping that he wouldn't want to talk more. He didn't. He went his way, I went mine. Then it occurred to me: What would I have said, if he were Avery? How would I have felt, then?

I'd said all the wrong things, done all the wrong things. I would have introduced myself. I should have asked him his name. I'd ask after his family, did he have brothers and sisters? Where's his mother and father? I'd ask what he was shopping for. I'd ask if he needed help, and if he said no, I'd tell him what I was shopping for: 3 fancy bowls for ice cream Sundays, a surprise for my children. I'd speak to him in a normal voice and I'd face him when I talked. I might even ask if he knows sign language.

I have so much to learn, still.

Before becoming Avery's mom, I would have said that I did all the things I did, that I behaved the way I had, because I couldn't be sure of what the man knew or didn't know, of what he understood or didn't understand. But that's not true. I've had whole conversations with people where neither of us were talking about the same thing. So knowledge, or understanding, wasn't what it was really about. Or rather, it was my lack of knowledge, my lack of understanding that I was protecting. I didn't know how to interact with people different than me, so I didn't.

I hope I have another chance. The next time I meet a new person, I want to find common ground. I want to learn about them and let them learn about me. I want to do it with sincerity, not as a kindness or an act of pity. I want to do this because I am the one who needed to keep talking when the man and I parted ways on the street in front of the thrift store. It just took me a while to see it.

From the moment the ultrasound technician, a long thin woman named Tally, smiled at me across the great, gooey expanse of my giant pregnant belly and held up 2 fingers, meaning twins, the babies were called Baby A and Baby B.

Being literal types, my husband Tom and I took it as a sign that we should give them an "A" name and a "B" name, to honor the very first facts of them. So it was Avery and Bennett, the 2 little boys I hadn't expected, but began imagining in the 8th week of my pregnancy.

Term, for twins pregnancies, is 37 weeks, usually. When my babies were born at 33 weeks, I remember asking asking a nurse, Why? It was a question full of mother-guilt and I was looking for reassurance that I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd rested and taken my vitamins--the prenatals and the Folic Acid and the B complexes. I'd slurped down protein shakes and Clif bars and drank plenty of water, as recommended. I'd done everything in my power to keep my babies safe and strong and yet, there we were, surrounded by machines and plastic tubing and impossibly small babies in the isolettes of the NICU.

I asked again, a little louder, Why did this happen? The nurse shrugged and nodded toward Avery, whom we knew by then had Down syndrome.

Almost as quickly as I found myself the mother of 2 babies, I became the mother of a child with disabilities. And the nurse's casual assumption that my premature delivery was because of Avery was the beginning of a realization for me: I had no idea how to be Avery's mom.

I'd had an image in my mind of the mother of a child with special needs as a selfless woman who gives and gives and gives. It was a vague picture that sometimes included a van with a lift in it (why would I need that?) and a handicap accessible ramp on the steps up to our house (again, why?). Which is a long way of saying I wasn't the most prepared person to mother this new child of mine.

Shortly after Avery was diagnosed, I found myself reading through an information sheet called "Myths and Facts." I took it as sort of a pretest and I failed: I believed all the myths. Down syndrome is not a rare genetic condition, but the most common one. It's not fatal, and 80% of adults with Down syndrome live to age 55 or beyond. People with Down syndrome are not severely retarded, but fall into the mild to moderate range, and they are not always happy (they have a full range of feelings, like everyone else).

As I learned about Avery, it became clear to me that his path would be different than Bennett's. For a while, I even quit calling them "the twins," because it was easier to separate them that way. They were bunk-mates, roommates, certainly connected, but not in a competition. It turned out to be one of the most helpful lessons I've learned as Avery's mom.

Bennett constantly compares himself to his older brother Carter. Bennett's is a keeping-track kind of childhood; a childhood spent on his tippy-toes looking ahead to the next thing, whatever that might be. He's a 4-year-old going on 10, wishing he could run faster, climb higher, grow taller, as fast as possible. His most-repeated expression is, "What about me?"

Avery's is a gentler, kinder path. He lives in the moment, his accomplishments coming in their own time, their own way. I wish I could teach Bennett the joy of being right where you are. But he's like the flower bulbs that are even now pushing themselves forward toward the earliest hints of Spring--the purple and white and yellow crocus, always first to bloom, despite the snow still on the ground.

Each year at this time, surrounded by the gray-blue mounds of snow and the crust of ice still across the roads, spring seems impossible. How will it ever work? How will the great, white world rearrange itself into greens and blues, pinks and purples and yellows? But it does, year after year. And I try to remember this. It takes faith. Faith in the way of things, faith in my place there, and the place of my children.

Sometimes in the mornings, I go for a walk. It's then I best appreciate the cool crisp of the day, the snow bluish gray, clouds that seem to be caught in the trees. My boots crunch through the surface and I make my own tracks, laying a trail in the windswept field. I'm reminded of the Snowy Day and the little boy in the book and his stick. It also occurs to me that lately, all my references are to children's stories, so firmly rooted am I in the world of my kids.

But there are advantages to this way of living: I find myself paying attention, since I've been a mom. And more often, I see the world from a child's perspective, which is filled with newness and wonder. It feels like a second chance: I used to love the world in this way, when I was a child, only in growing up, I mostly forgot. Now, I hope I can remember to look with a child's eyes, even when my children are grown.

I walk until I reach the dilapidated wooden shed that holds an abandoned Kenmore electric range and a lime-green wringer washer, dented on one side. An old headlight hangs from the wall, next to rusty hubcaps and part of a screen. My eyes take in each of these things, trying to see them clearly, as they are, just as they might look to a child, when I notice something I've never seen before--an old branding iron. The brand is in the shape of a heart.

On my way home, I notice other things too, like the way the wind sighs through the trees and makes the barbed wire sing; the way the snow pools in the draws, which is where the trees grow, and that there are other tracks in the snow besides mine--coyotes, and rabbits, and deer. The deer tracks look like little upside-down hearts.

Today is Valentine's Day and I'm seeing hearts everywhere.

I think about the symbolic giving of hearts, versus the real giving of hearts. I remember long-ago Valentines when Tom and I were a new couple, and I used to get that flipping feeling in my stomach just being near him. Then later, days full of love still, but different. I never tired of watching Tom hold our first baby, Carter, in his arms, knowing this man was the best father I could have chosen, if I'd been thinking ahead that far.

Our second pregnancy brought more surprises: twins Avery and Bennett, and Avery's genetic condition. One of the things I was told to expect as a new mom to Avery was that my marriage would suffer. My experience has been that Avery's diagnosis was an opportunity to learn about my husband: the chance to see him in a new light, watch him love without expectation of reward, without any guile or deceit or self-interest. Simply, love. Seeing Tom with Avery, I realized that the man I married is a person I deeply admire--my guide, my partner, my strength when I don't have any, a soul I'm honored to know.

Down syndrome, the diagnosis, with all its statistics and uncertainty and unknowns, is still sometimes scary to me. The worry, and the fear, are big and powerful and looming, not different from the fear I occasionally feel for my other children, but more lonely, because there are fewer people walking this path with us.

The best way to quiet my uneasy mind, I've found, is to look at what's in front of me--the things I can count or touch or hold. The number of months Avery has been healthy; the purple crayon marks in the shapes of letters; the boy, himself.

It's easier, then, when I set aside what I've been told to expect, or the things I read, and just look at my life, Avery eating yogurt in the mornings (he calls it "yo-yo"), or the children racing around the house playing tag. Blanket forts and library books and sugar cookies; later in the day, macaroni painted pink and red, glued on cardboard hearts for Daddy.

I don't know what the future holds, for any of us. I think of the many hearts around me: heart-shaped branding irons and deer tracks in the snow and 3 little boys, proud of their artwork for dad. All I have is today, and this heart, and my love to give. It's not a mistake to give it. Of this, I am certain.

The old couch, the new couch. The plaid ottoman and the matching chair. The coffee table book on the front flap. Inside the kitchen cupboard below the sink. Underneath the dining room table. The floor by the book shelf. The wall beneath the family room window and the wall behind the Lego table in the boys' room. The Lego table. The plastic fire station, the Hot Wheels track. The wooden rocking horse. The doll house. The doll.

These were the previous canvases of my 4-year-old son Avery's art work. The boy loves to draw and although he knows better, he can't seem to help himself from using the world as his art pad. He also has a sixth sense for locating every stray crayon, especially the purple ones.

When we made our move to this new, old log house, I bought a giant role of white butcher paper and I packed a handful of crayons in a zip-lock bag, which I was careful to keep under my watchful eye, at least for the first weeks. Until today, when I found purple squiggles on one of the fading sheets of old wallpaper. The squiggles look like the letters we've been working on--O's and T's and a C--and are clearly the work of my purple crayon artist.

Avery is my middle son, a fraternal twin, and shortly after birth, he was diagnosed with Down syndrome. While we were still in the hospital, one of the nurses remarked, in an offhand way, what a shame it was that Avery would never learn to read. At the time, it seemed like a great blow. I didn't know, then, anything about children with Down syndrome. I didn't know it was a ridiculous thing for her to say: I only knew that I hoped she was wrong.

So Avery's letters on the wallpaper are beautiful to me, like the beginning of an answer to a long-ago prayer. But the crayon marks are frustrating, too, because I expect Avery to know better.

"Crayons are for coloring, Avery," I say in my most-stern mommy voice, the one I reserve for occasions such as this one. "We color on the white paper, at the table, in the kitchen. Not on the walls." Avery's face crumples when I scold him; his is a whole-body frown.

I immediately feel horrible. Partly, it's my fault. We read Harold and the Purple Crayon over and over and who can resist it? The little boy, Avery's size, creating the world as he wants it to be, making it up as he goes along. And isn't that what we're all doing everyday? Making it up as we go?

As Avery grows and he becomes more able to tell me what he's thinking, I'm learning about the patterns of his mind and the way his world works. For instance, the other night at dinner, I told him he needed to have a bite of spaghetti before he could have his jello.

"Kay," he said, then did as I asked. He took a bite of spaghetti, then a bite of jello. Then another bite of spaghetti, and another bite of jello. Again, and again.

When I noticed what he was doing, I realized I hadn't been clear in my request: all Avery saw was the pattern, one that didn't make much sense to him, but something he accepted anyway, simply because I asked him to.

Or, bees. This summer was the summer of the yellow jackets and one hot, smoky day, while the boys were playing outside on the porch, Avery was stung. He cried and cried, inconsolable, unable to understand why such a mean thing had happened. But once he recovered, he remembered what he'd learned that unsuspecting afternoon. Since then, to him, all bugs are bees and all bees are bad.

His is a world with bold definition, its meanings simple and clear. All women are mommies; all men, daddies. People are for waving hello to, cats are for petting. Laughter is always a good choice. Children are for playing with, nighttime is for sleep, and daylight is beautiful, to be greeted with great happiness.

Life at its most clear, Avery's purple crayon laying down the shapes, pulling lines out of the air. I want to live with him there, in his purple thought, his purple world.

"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.)

The new, old log house we've been calling home these past 2 weeks is in the cup of a little valley rimmed on 3 sides with gently sloping hills of Douglas fir and juniper and jack pine. The fourth side is open, and it's through this break that the 2-track dirt road meanders toward town.

Town is 9 people and a combination post office/cafe where you can pick up your mail if it's there, unless it's Thursday, the day of the mail route, when a young married couple drives the letters and magazines and packages out into the country and delivers them to all the over-sized mailboxes. (When the weather is bad, they call ahead to let you know the mail will be late.)

To get to town, we follow the 2-track trail across the creek, through a wide clearing dotted with black cows, past a vacant green house, through another ranch. Past a new barn, past an old log homesteader's cabin, around a set of wooden corrals. Across the same creek again, then up toward the road, where the 2-track meets the washboard surface of the gravel county road, twisting and turning through range land occupied by black yearlings licking snow from their noses.

At the highway, we can stop at the post office/cafe, where we might get a plate of macaroni and cheese or a bowl of ham and bean soup; we could buy a Hershey's or a KitKat or a Coke; we could pick up a loaf of bread or a half-gallon of milk; or we could keep driving until we reach the next settlement, which is not big, but bigger, with a grocery store and a gas station and even a library.

Which is to say, we live a very long ways away from almost everything, including our neighbors.

My first lesson in neighboring came from Helen, our white-haired landlady when Tom and I were newlyweds. She and her husband, old Vic, owned a cherry orchard carved from the mountainside that surrounded their little homestead. In the summer, they sold sweet cherries U-pick. Helen kept a giant weaving loom strung with parallel lines of white string in the front room of their house, on which she made rag rugs and baby blankets. I remember her telling me that if Tom and I had a baby, she'd give me one of her blankets, almost like an incentive.

It was from Helen that I learned the importance of being neighborly. My first tomato plants came from her and she showed me how to plant them, deep in the warm ground of summer. A quart jar of honey; a bunch of rhubarb, which she called pie plant, bundled with twine. These gifts were always unexpected, like finding a $5 bill in your pocket. And with them, she was teaching me about life in the country: that in this sweeping landscape, our proximity to each other ties us together.

Our neighbors here, in our 70-year-old log house, wave or stop to visit as we drive through their place. The husband is a man with a gray beard and eyes the color of sea glass. He wears a wool Scotch cap with the ear flaps down, and when we tell him our reason for going to town (the broken water heater) he replies, "Doing without makes you appreciate what you have."

Which is how I found myself later, after our trip to town, sitting in my rocking chair cutting the buttons from an old flannel shirt, worn beyond repair. I collected each button in a glass baby food jar, to save for later. You never know when you might need a button. And when that task was finished, I ripped the flannel into strips, for rags. You never know when you might need a flannel rag.

Mine is a new-found frugality. I think it's a byproduct of living in this house, once inhabited by a woman who saved mayonnaise jars and pickle jars and baby food jars on wooden shelves in the cellar. A woman whose books include High School Self Taught and The Star Gazer; God and Myself: An Inquiry Into the True Religion and What They Ask About Marriage; An Anthology of Greek Drama and The Odyssey, which I find wrapped in tissue and saved in the same box as the old photographs.

I wonder about the woman: Did she have 3 children, too? Did she sit in a rocking chair, snipping buttons from a little boy's faded shirt? She's looked out the same windows as I have, has seen the same up slope of the hillside, the same fringe of trees along the skyline. She's walked along the same fence and passed through the gate at the front door, a gate with an archway that I've walked beneath at least a hundred times by now.

I look more closely at it, the 2 tall posts made of logs with a third across the top, slightly bowed in the middle. In the fading purple light of dusk, against the bluing snow, the shape becomes familiar to me. It's the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, also called Pi, which is a mathematical constant, an irrational number, and a transcendental number. A way of naming what cannot be named, like infinity, which always makes me think of the stars in the night sky, bright pinpricks of light that are just beginning to shine.