My best friend has a huge backyard vegetable garden, with a tall fence to keep out deer and paths mulched down with damp cardboard. Just before lunchtime today, we went out together with our two almost-two-year-old sons to pick arugula for our pear, walnut, cranberry, and blue cheese salad.
It was raining. Perhaps you would say it was pouring.
Her son was decked out in a full rainsuit. He grinned and laughed, stomping in mud puddles and dragging a pitchfork through the mud.
My son was daintier, wearing a beautiful borrowed felted jacket, trotting up and down the paths.
My best friend had a small basket. She dropped arugula leaves in one by one as she picked them.
I kept an eye on the pitchfork and on my son's progress, occasionally scooping him up to whisk him away from trampling on plants and back onto one of the paths.
The rain soaked our faces and plastered down our hair. The whole garden was full of rain. The sky and the day were gray but the garden was swimming in greens.
My son ran stomping across the soaked cardboard, managing not to slip, his eyes shining and his smile bigger than his face. Her son had managed to streak his face and clothes with mud; one particularly artistic streak of dark mud across his light hair made him look kind of punk rock, although his huge-toothed grin was pure sunshine.
When my son is happy, I am happy.
Perhaps if I didn't have a little son who loved to be outside in all weather, I might have stayed cozily inside, my hands wrapped around a mug of tea, watching the rain fall past the window. But I do have such a little son, and so there I was, standing outside in the pouring rain. . .
I felt so present in that garden, in that rain, in that day, in that moment. Wet and serene, I smiled and thought: Here's another gift of motherhood.
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