Jasper’s getting so big. There are moments when – in just the right light, with just the right angle – he looks like a little boy. Which he is, I suppose. He’s almost seventeen months old. He’s a toddler. He’s still not saying much, but he is a force of energy who spends every waking minute – and even some unwoken minutes – asserting his presence in the world. He runs, he jumps, he shrieks and hoots and giggles and siezes each and every single day by the cookies.

And then he stops for a moment and pauses and his boyish stillness takes my breath away.

I still haven’t cut his hair. Oh, I’ve snipped at his bangs a little – I did this at my Dad’s house, actually, and I let the wisps of baby hair fall into the cedar bushes surrounding his front steps, where, I imagined, they’d bind, however intangibly, this moment in Jasper’s babyhood to my father’s history – but I’ve otherwise let his fluffy yellow curls just tumble into a baby-mullet, the better to preserve his babyness, the babyness that I’m so loathe to let go of.

(‘Of which I’m so loathe to let go’? Lack of sleep is interfering with my grammar. It is also interfering with my ability to think clearly, which is why this post is turning into a sort of stream-of-consciousness revery.)

(On my list of books to re-read, if I ever regain clarity of mind and a spare half-hour in any given day: Rousseau’s Reveries Of A Solitary Walker. I reappropriated the copy that I’d given my Dad. I’ve not yet flipped through to see if he made notes in the margins, which was his habit, as it is mine. I hope, fervently, that he did, although I have moments of hoping, equally as fervently, that he did not, so that I might revisit that book without being haunted.)

(I’ve asked before whether it is odd to wish both to be haunted and to not be haunted. I still have not settled upon an answer.)

(Did I mention? STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Also, HAVE NOT SLEPT.)

Today is one of those days – and don’t such days always seem to occur in autumn? – when times seems to be passing both too quickly and too slowly. The leaves on the trees are turning and dying and falling and for every moment that seems to take an eternity – a leaf floats to the ground while we wait for the school bell to ring – there’s another – that same leaf is snatched up by a wee bemittened hand and stuffed in a pocket – that passes in an instant.

All of these moments – the still moments, the rushed moments, the moments that have passed and those that have yet to pass – are precious. I’m taking time to remember that. I’m taking time to practice being still, myself. I’m taking time.

I hope that there’s a lot of it left.