Showing posts with label recliner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recliner. Show all posts

Sunday, August 12, 2012

A description of you sleeping in my lap

Looking through the journal I kept from autumn 2009, here's another entry about you, dated Oct. 10, 2009. You were only two at the time but closing on three:

This afternoon you slept in my arms as I sat in the living room recliner, reading Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead." Though the time for me to begin dinner had passed, I could not bear to rise and wake you; you looked so peaceful with your head crooked into my arm and side tucked against my waist. Regardless, we will not have too many more days like this, for you already are just a bit too long to fit comfortably on my lap in that chair, but you're still able to manage it with the bending of legs and slight contortion of the torso.

Upon finishing a section of the novel, I gazed down at you to relish the sweet moment, only to find sweat beaded upon your temple and bove your upper lip. You could not have been hot, for a cool breeze swept through the open windows on this mild autumn day. "He must be having a bad dream," I thought, and this worried me for there really was no way to make the dream stop other than wake you, and - perhaps more worrisome to me - I had no way of knowing what frightened you so in your sleep. You are beginning to imagine the world in way I cannot fathom.

I gently brushed the beaded sweat away with a finger, first the temple, then above the mouth, and finally along your sideburns where new drops had formed. You twitched, but it wasn't enough to wake you, though I must have broken the dream for you did not sweat again.