March 13

DRACONIA KEEP where Magic and Dreams Become Reality

March 13, 2007

Nine days until Spring!!!

Here is the edited version of the little thing I wrote for Lance for his birthday. Crits are welcome. <G>

A Different Measure

I scorched scrambled eggs while I told Doug I was pregnant. How ironic because cooking breakfast is his job. He enjoys it, the rhythms and the busyness, so it’s a routine we’ve settled into over the years. But I felt domesticated —the magic stick showed two lines that morning, and I knew this third baby would be our last.

Doug looked at me blankly, slightly scared, but bemused, kissed me perfunctorily and raced to the barn to clean our horses’ stalls. Those rhythms too would settle him. It would take him a few days to get used to the idea of another baby even though we’d been trying. After all, I remembered he didn’t speak to me for two weeks when I told him about our first. He’d looked at me like I had grown another head, and he jumped when I moved too fast. Then he’d been frightened of the responsibilities, the changes of having a child. But this time, we both knew also the joys and trials, and nervous or not, we both were looking forward to it.

But the next eight months wore on all of us—Doug and our daughters and me. Morning sickness meant nothing. “All Day Sickness” consumed us all. It didn’t ease up at four months, but it lingered on until shortly before I gave birth. In the meantime, as the days of my pregnancy wore on, my pace faltered and stumbled, tripping over nothing, losing my equilibrium getting out of bed. The girls and Doug tried their best to ease me back into a familiar tempo, but my body kept me unbalanced. The winter wore on long, cold and icy, and I couldn’t see the horses for two long months. Doug wouldn’t let me take the chance of falling.

I think he found solace there in the barn. Quiet and peace with the mindless chores away from the girls’ giggles and my constant pallor. A different world with different characters and needs, the horses needed him, and he needed them as well.

How I missed them too--the knickers, the sweet, warming smells of hay and horse and the soft hair through my brush, back and forth, shining their coats. During those long cold days, I longed for a warm summer’s day with a thinner body flying along in cadence on the back of my Morgan mare down the fields away from the dry, empty warmth of the house. Just to feel good again.

But then I’d feel the beat of the hiccups and kicks of the tiny warrior in my womb, and I could hold on for just a little while longer.

When the cold, arctic-sunny day finally came, and in his liquid eyes, the hours I’d spent lying in bed, only racing with the horses in the recesses of my mind, the girls and Doug beside me faded away. The tempo of our family completed, the summer and the barn beckoned.

Soon our son would meet the horses, and he would feel their magical rhythm too.