Comfort

The sun isn't up yet, but there's a light on in the kitchen. Chris is making tea. The house smells like jasmine. Katherine's standing by my bed again, but this time I'm not startled. I don't get up. "You need to go back to sleep," I whisper, looking at the clock behind her, "it's 4:30 in the morning."

"I can't sleep, Mommy." She climbs into my bed, rests her head on the pillow, and looks at me. Her cheeks are splotched, scarlet, and her lips are crimson. "I don't feel good," she whimpers. "Will you read me a story?"

No, I think, closing my eyes. My throat is burning, my back is aching, but now she's coughing. Her hair is heavy with sweat and I reach out, thinking I'll brush it off her neck, thinking that will be cooling, but she squirms away. She slips her hand inside my hand and pulls me toward the door. "Please," she says. "Come on, Mommy."

In the living room, her body is too hot, too close; the room is spinning. We're in the story chair, reading. The words are slipping from my lips, but they have to find their own cadence, their own rhythm. I'm reading, but I'm not listening. I'm so hot, is all I'm thinking. Then my voice strikes a different chord, it finds a different timbre, and the room turns in the opposite direction.

This is my mother's voice I'm hearing.

And now I'm a child again, feverish and small, but I'm also the mother reading. My eyes are watering, and suddenly I'm shivering, shaking, and I think again (as I've thought before in times of stress and sickness), I'm turning into my mother.

It's in the flash of my hands and the tone of my voice; it's the constant, the comfort, the gift of growing older.

So I lean against the cushions and Katherine snuggles closer, and we keep reading.

**Finding the Bigger Picture through Simple Moments.**