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“Mommy said I shouldn’t disturb you if you’re painting.”
A laugh rumbles out of my chest. “It’s all right. What’s up, cutie? Want to come in and help me paint?”
Maddie shakes her head. “Elijah and I wanna show you something.”
“Yeah? What sort of something?”
“You have to come andsee, silly.” She reaches for my hand and tugs it impatiently. I laugh again as she pulls me down the stairs. For a scrawny nine-year-old, she’s surprisingly strong.
Not that I’m resisting her request in the slightest.
As we reach the bottom of the stairs, I see my gorgeous wife sitting at the dining table, focused on the laptop in front of her, a fresh cup of coffee whispering steam into the air. Between helping raise our kids and co-owning a gallery in the city with Cory, it would be an understatement to say that Sasha has her hands full. But she always insists that she loves it, and I know my wife well enough to know she’s telling me the truth.
“You have to come too, Mommy!” our daughter declares, holding out her other hand with even more impatience.
Sasha looks up from her laptop, eyebrows raised with amusement. “Where are we going, exactly?” she asks as she stands up from her chair. Damn, she’s right—her belly really did pop overnight. I’ll never get over how beautiful my wife looks with a pregnant belly, whether she’s just beginning to show or she’s a week past her due date. Bringing new life into this world truly is a magical thing.
“No time for questions!” Maddie huffs, and pulls the two of us in a rush toward the sliding doors in the living room that lead out to our back deck.
Once outside, our daughter guides us out into the yard, weaving around the large shady trees on our property until at last we reach the spot where our five-year-old son is waiting. He’s crouched down behind a large rock, a pair of binoculars pressed to his face beneath his wild head of hair.
“Are they still there?” Maddie asks urgently.
“Uh-huh,” Elijah mumbles.
“Well, stop hogging the binoculars!”
Elijah drops them from his face, gives his sister an annoyed look, then thrusts them out to her. “Fine.Here.”
“Thank you, Elijah,” Maddie says sweetly, then spins around and holds them out to her mother. “Here, Mommy. Take a look. The nest is over in that pine tree.”
Sasha lifts the binoculars to her eyes, searches for a few moments, and then, with a little gasp, finds what she’s looking for.
“Oh, look at that,” Sasha murmurs. “I think I see…two babies and a mama bird? It looks like they’re hawks?”
“They’re red-tailed hawks,” Maddie says proudly. “And there’s three babies, not two.”
“Wait! I see the third one. Oh, how sweet.” Sasha hands the binoculars over to me with a smile, and I hold them up to see what all the fuss is about.
It’s easy to spot the mama hawk—she’s standing protectively on one side of the large nest—but it takes a moment for the baby hawks’ fluffy, soft gray heads to poke up again. When they do, warmth surges in my chest. I’m still watching them when the papa hawk comes out of nowhere and lands in the nest, the babies bobbing their heads excitedly at his return.
“Sure is a beautiful sight,” I say, handing the binoculars back to our daughter. I wrap an arm around Sasha and she leans against me as we watch our kids take turns watching the birds, their giggling and soft exclamations of awe as sweet as music to my ears.
For the first forty years of my life, I never even dared to imagine that I could have a life like this. And yet here it is, right in front of me and all around me: a wife I cherish, two children already discovering the wonders of the world, a third whose arrival we’re eagerly awaiting, a home for all of us, and a patch of land to call our own. I can’t imagine wanting anything more.
I still feel most connected to the earth when I’m sitting in front of a canvas, paintbrush in hand, radio on, applying layer after layer of thick paint. That will always be my passion, my way of understanding and interacting with the world. But my wife and kids are what I live for. They’re my life, my obsession, my everything.
For them, I would do anything.
