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Entering the 2nd trimester with "Thing 2" (a moniker used with the utmost affection), I don't sleep much these days. I wake up at 3:00 am and toss and turn until morning, trying unsucceedingly to light upon a thought that will give me some peace and lull me back to sleep. This morning, a memory occurred to me...sort of out of the blue. Don't brace yourself--it's not earth-shattering.

I was maybe 7 years old. It was a time in my life where I spent a lot of time with Nonnie. At any opportunity I had, I'd spend both weekend nights at her hourse. Anyway, it was a snapshot memory. I was watering her grass in the back yard. The sun was just going down, but it was still warm (Nonnie never watered her grass during the day; the water would just "burn off" in the sun). I meticulously covered ever square inch with the fine spray from the hose, glad to be doing it "all by myself." Angelo and Lillian were out in their yard, picking grapes or some such thing. Nonnie and the neighbors chat over the space that was their shared driveway.

I told you--nothing dramatic. But I had this thought that it was a lifetime ago. Another world that I was in at 7 years old, so remote and so different from the one I live in now. Where Alice, the upstairs tenant of Angelo and Lillian, could be single at 32 years old, have hair trailing down her back to her butt, walk to her job at the Super Duper every day...and be seen simply as a "nice lady" with no baggage, no story. Just a “nice lady.”

The thing that got me as I lay in bed this morning is that it wasn’t another world or a lifetime ago. It was a day. One day that was connected to today by all the other days in between. I hate to get too esoteric here, but it gave me a new way of thinking about my life, if even for a moment. It made me wonder when it happens that we stop seeing our days connected to all the other days? When do stories become separated by gulfs, with all that’s in between falling into hopeless irrelevancy? And what does that necessitate that we overlook?

Thoughts at 3:00 am rarely make a lot of sense…though they seem so wise at the time! I’m going to chew on this for a while…