Abe was right.

Marriage makes it harder to blog.

It seems that I have the time or inclination to write here when Jeremiah is out of town. I think it's because when he's around or I'm able to talk to him regularly, everything I want to write about during the day I end up sharing over dinner. Then once I share it verbally, I can't imagine it written.

What did I want to say to him tonight? Instead of emailing him now, I'll write it here. As I was coming over the river on my way home, the air smelled like my grandparents' wood stove in Saluda, North Carolina. I was heftily transported to summer nights in the mountains, when my willowy grandfather would come tromping in his leather workboots, his arms full of wood he'd just chopped at age 80. For hours all my aunts, my uncle, my parents, and my grandmom--my granddad would have gone to bed early--would sit in the living room around the wood stove and talk and talk and talk. While the chilly night settled outside, we'd talk altogether and we'd talk in little groups. It was always a good party with my dad's family. Sometimes we'd form small enclaves on the sleeping porch to work on art projects or to have a clothes swap. Then at the end of the night, we cousins would lay out on the heavily carpeted floor of the Saluda living room and fall asleep to the sound of night birds through the windows and the slow-burning embers in the woodstove.

I wanted to tell Jeremiah about it because it was such an immediate, achey memory thrust upon me by that smell in the air, and it's a memory that Jeremiah hasn't experienced yet. Remind me to take him to Saluda this summer.