Baby smiles and spicy gumbo

Sometimes you just gotta say screw it all, leave the pile of folders, leave the music playing, leave it all-lights on and all-and go for a walk with your oldest college pal and his baby. You just gotta soak up all of her smiles that you can, miles and miles of them, one after another like waves crashing. Crescendo diminish crescendo. You gotta walk through the perfect chill of evening despite the cars, despite the flies, despite the shopping list that will again be postponed until tomorrow. You gotta walk and talk about what 10 years of chipping away at a dream looks like. How choices and lack of choices and no knowledge that there were choices have lead you here. How you should be proud of where you have gotten, even if it's just a launching place for where you wanna go. Maybe it has to take 10 years. Maybe you have to give up the idea of getting up at 5am to write and accept that you're gonna do that show another weekend and maybe you needed that walk to figure it out. Or maybe you just needed the walk to say it out loud. Maybe you gotta just pick up that smiley baby and hug on her for a little while and forget you're holding a whole life in your arms and let her get heavy enough to put back down. Sometimes you're not quite finished so you gotta walk them home and hug your his wife, your best friend, and watch her hold her baby so sweetly and let her feed you the gumbo that makes you howl once in a while from the spice. And eat the last of the homemade apple butler. With a spoon. And wonder why, when our lives are the busiest and the craziest and the most exhausting, why, WHY, must that be the moment that we JUST HAVE TO refold the cloth napkins and rearrange the bottom kitchen drawer. And sit in silence with the late night guys on and wish to go back to college and watch movies together late at night, on a weekday. Just for a little while. (But also bring my husband back with us... What college would have been like with a man...) And let it be time to go and walk home to the house with the windows open and the music still playing. The piles are easier to tidy. The mind a little clearer, like the surfaces of the desk become. The night quieted and lovely. And loved. Sometimes you just have to say screw it.