It’s not that caring for babies is difficult, that’s easy. It’s the doing of anything else that’s the hard part. Getting dressed for instance. (James and I are still in are pajamas at eight, even though we have been up since six, and his mother has been gone an hour. His father is still at a conference in Portland.) Taking a walk is easy once we are actually moving– but the prep time can be stressful. Getting young James into a car seat designed to launch infant astronauts to Mars, a frontpack for mother mountaineers, and the rain shield on the marathon rock-hopping stroller has me wishing I studied engineering instead of history. (My own mother is dead now, so no one can arrest her for putting three of us under three on a blanket in the back of a Corvair station wagon and driving eight hours from New York to Pennsylvania to visit her mother for a few weeks.)
James and I and his lovely dog Annie, have been taking twice daily walks– one in the stroller around the neighborhood, and the other, the longer trek, on the paths and trails of what once was the mining town of Treadwell, among the ruins and moss and trees. When we aren’t doing that we are eating, or changing, or playing. (He has been rolling around between pillow bunkers next to me on the bed. Although it appears that time is up…) And honestly, caring well for a child, even a very small little boy who won’t remember anything we do today, is a better way to make the world a better place than anything else I will ever do.
