The Wuggy Chronicles

The day started without me this morning, when I was awakened to find three toddlers on my bed, only two of whom were mine.

From that moment on, I have been organzing children nonstop, directing them outside, then inside, separating them and gathering them up.

Now, as the sky flames out, I am finally able to gather and organize my own thoughts, pausing now and again to call the kids back to our own space, ask them to reunite the water bottles with their lids for the umpteenth time. The flow of activity is constant, and they still need a good bit of direction, but it's less consuming in the cool of the evening.

I use the term "cool" in the loosest sense possible--it is still 100 degrees in the remaining scraps of sunlight, but it is almost bearable in the shade, which is more than I could say an hour ago. RV life has been so good for us, but our travel trailer heats up terribly in the summer. Days like this leave me longing for adobe.

Some days we take refuge by the river, where the water flows cool, and cottonwoods and willows filter the sun. The threat of flooding keeps us away many afternoons, but when we return, there will be even more gloriously squishy clay, The kids will shape it, sculpt it, and track it all over the trailer. These days they request a pottery wheel as often as they ask for a(nother) dog. I dream of finding a bit of earth with mud just like this. We will shape it into walls to absorb and soften the brutal desert heat, contain and organize this profusion of life. For now, it is enough to structure and restructure the space that we do have. The stuff of chaos is also the stuff of order, and the work of life is simply to arrange the elements, begining with itself.