oh my sweet carolina.

we're just home from a few days with pippi and chief, and i swear i will be scrubbing carolina soil from francis' rompers 'til kingdom come. and how i love that -- the way days stitch themselves into our clothes, onto our skin. and how happy i am made -- sharing the novelties of southern summer with my northern stars, living days with my baby in the foothills where i was a baby, seeing his grandparents pour their love into him, feeling fresh air and cold lake nourishing my bones. our homecoming has been a love song of pitchers filled with hydrangeas -- anything to make these days last even a little bit longer. 

precious memories, every single one.

with the quiet.

our earliest breaths of this new year were spent in south carolina living slowly, quietly. we delighted in heirlooms from a first christmas: the stocking pippi knit for francis, the rocking horse chief built with birch wood and his own hands. we tried coffeeshops strewn across greenville like rose petals. we nibbled rosemary shortbread and dropped in on friends. we drove north along the blue ridge one afternoon and had lunch and coffee, shopped for shoes and admired old houses. we rested and and read and went for drives and passed tins of buckeyes. i got very sick and stayed in bed; chris was back at work and chief and pippi rose with me in the night, keeping me comfortable and loving on our sweet boy and bringing him to me to nurse and sleep. i slept under a roof of my teenage years aside my husband and baby, and thought how funny time moves. and when two weeks had passed and we boarded a plane home, i felt another thought melting over me: how very much we needed this.

the magnolias were blooming.

work carried chris to my hometown, of all places, last week and so francis and i tagged along, happy for a stretch of days with faraway dears and grateful for the serendipity of it all.

when we arrived, the magnolias were blooming the size of dinner plates and i was able to point to them and tell francis that i married his papa under a magnolia tree. someday, we'll take him to charleston and show him the very tree, but for now, i like to know that he's smelled them in full bloom so early in his life.

slices of time i want to remember: sipping coffee on a winding drive across the blue ridge, supper with the martins in their white house, gathering on the porch for conversation and grilled pizza, our good little traveler so jolly on his third and fourth flights, cotton candy carolina skies, berry shortbread from the farmers market, the posy of roses she plucked from her mama's garden and tied with a string.

south for a time.

it was bare feet and drives in the country, sweet potato cake and the smell of carolina jasmine. my husband at the grill, my father bouncing my son. coffee hours with soul sisters, babes afoot. walks in the sunshine, feeling warmth on my face and in my bones, believing these days to be every kind of sacred.

i needed this. i needed it all. i needed to witness my baby boy in the arms of my father, in the arms of my oldest friends, in the rearview mirror as i drove the roads that raised me. i needed to be where i began.