I read best in bed. Often with a hand on a book, occasionally with my eyes open. I was thus when Dear Girl walked in to say hello. She was standing at my feet looking at me and the window directly behind my bed. As we were chatting she said, "Look look, a hummingbird is at the window!" I sighed, knowing this was going to require participation. Only an asshole refuses to look at a hummingbird. With a tiny bit of swallowed hostility, I raised my eyes. Because I'm a loving mother, I was also willing to slightly lift my chin. With my face tilted, pointing back at the window, I saw a hummingbird flying in a straight downward line, less than 12 inches from my eyes and getting rapidly closer.

The little bird must have seen red leaves in the glass reflecting from a Dogwood tree across the yard. As she lowered herself, she poked her beak through the mesh window screen, blink blink blink, reaching to taste phantom red flashes of light. I clearly saw her tiny tongue several times, smaller and pointier than her delicate sharp beak. How often do you get to see a hummingbird's tongue?

At the park last week a baby fell asleep in my lap. I held him for over an hour as he slept. I know this sounds unlikely, but I was sitting in a wooden rocking chair. I bring that chair to the park every Thursday. Mothers sit in a circle, an encampment really, and we all bring chairs. The cheapest tattiest and lightest chair I have happens to be a wooden rocker I bought at a yard sale for $10. It was a rare find. I had no idea that rocker would become such an important tool in my life, nor that it might facilitate such a rare gratifying moment.

How are you going to get a baby into your arms in a park, if you don't already have one? And how often is that baby going to go heavy and damp and moosh-up in a relaxed collapsing ball, and fall all the way into that glitterdust place we go when we sleep, while you hold them? I'm always on the lookout for exactly this and I can promise you, it doesn't happen very often at all. His breath wafted up as he slept and I tried not to stare at him too intently while we gently rocked, I tried not to seem quite as obsessive as I felt. Yes, I wanted to eat him up, to steal him, to melt together somewhere safe from time's inexorable arms. What I really wanted was another opportunity to hold my own babies just that way. As we rocked, I remembered concentrating on my own children sleeping in my lap, willing myself to remember every nuance of detail, knowing I would fail. They would grow. The moment would pass. Time holds us suspended at fixed distances.

I am in an overstuffed chair in a dim room with my back to the door, in a place only marginally safe. I am nursing my sleepy son. Shutting out everything else, I force myself to notice everything about him: his weight, his perfect damp smell, his fat warm hands, the brown fringe around the back of his head, his ears, his red mouth, his pull, his lazy foot gently kick-kicking in my hand. My arms are tired, my mind wary, my feelings bottomlessly grateful for this perfect moment.