When we are here there is no hurrying and no herding and no lunch-packing, no prying small hands off of my body, no pushes toward the school door, no blue eyes full of longing to be home. We walk along the bay bottom at low tide and dig, and we poke at slimy things with long sticks. We pick up the hermit crabs, and we talk about how we love our visits to the beach, and we don’t talk about the times in between. We are different people when we are here.

Four cousins who had never met became fast friends. The brothers gave a free concert to the frogs in the pond, and the frogs gave a free concert back to the brothers. And I floated barefoot through the clover and whispered to the fireflies, and refilled my margarita glass once or twice.

I turned 37 years old on an eastbound Metro train. Two German women sat talking across the aisle from me. I caught every tenth word or so. A Vietnam veteran and his family waved from the front of the car, thanking me again for guiding them through their passcard purchase back at the Vienna station. A warm and little six year-old hand rested on my belly skin for comfort. I closed my eyes and felt the curve of the tracks beneath me.

This morning we discovered in a most comical way that my eight year old is a grapheme-color synesthete, meaning that, in her mind, each letter of the alphabet has a color associated with it. Words have colors, too, usually based on their first letter but not always. Watch the video for an explanation of our discovery, and a demonstration. I am amazed that I have been her mother for eight years and never knew this about her, and she is amazed that not everyone “feels” colors in letters and words like she does. She would like to know if there are other girl synesthetes out there with whom she may correspond, so we’re putting out a call to other color-feelers. What color is your “A”?

Last week we sat together on a single chair at Starbucks, waiting for our Frappucino. I piled her long limbs into my lap and circled her with my arms, holding in her angles and big feet. I rubbed my nose into her hair, and she closed her eyes. “You two are so in love,” said a woman to us in passing. “That’s so rare to see.” She lingered in the kitchen with me all of this morning while I made scones and coffee. She slipped out for a few minutes, then returned and handed me this card. I whispered my thanks into her sweet, soft neck.

John’s late grandmother would sit here in her Jordache cut-offs and read in the evenings, her feet propped up on the ottoman and a glass of watered-down wine beside her. At low tide, a warm breeze would come to her through the sliding glass door, smelling of muck and mussels and ruffling the pages of her book.

We weren’t really lost; we could see the house just across the cove. But the fields were so very cold and muddy, and the winds came off the water and whipped stinging sand at our eyes and mouths, making the evening seem desperate and epic. And so our thoughts and conversation turned to fire and food and warmth and shelter. The Muscari pushed toward the sunset, unfeeling, insensitive to our struggle for survival.

I found it at the edge of the Atlantic, lifeless, grey, sliding in the foam. The pain of the frigid waters shot up my legs as I darted in to pluck the ocean’s dead from her shallows. The white last now sits on my window sill, the trophy of a landlocked housewife.

I am very glad that I am not a mama pig. Wait a minute. My young roll around in the mud, too. Maybe I am a mama pig. If so, I got gypped in the boob department.