On a Silent Hill

Sometimes it takes the most unexpected things in life to make one appreciate the good stuff. After a week of hard work, I look forward to a quiet time at home with R. However, since the Thing That Wails came along, the weekends are beginning to feel like weekdays ... sometimes even worse.

Tired and worn out, conversations going round in circles about the Origin of the Noise, a.k.a. Why is The Baby Crying? ... in between the moments of wakefulness and half-sleep, I glimpsed at my wife. Tired, sore, soldiering on as a mom, sometimes (to borrow the title of a movie we watched together), crying out in the centre of the world, but not knowing who's listening. And yet, she smiles for me.

That made me think about how far we have come. The photo above was taken on our honeymoon; we had been wandering around like lost sheep on old pastures outside a small (forsaken) town in the Spanish hillsides just outside of Priego de Cordoba. It was a very very quiet day with grey skies, and no one else around for miles. Perhaps a lone sheep or two sprinkled on a distant hills. The cold wintry air biting our skin, and the lone naked tree, like a half-frozen thunder. There, R sits on the rocks, half-smiling.

I remember now, how she, despite my idiotic notions of adventure backpacking, had been nursing me back to health after I fell sick at Granada, (having insisted on eating salted fish on a cold hilltop). She, patient, petite, stuck with me, even though I was poor company.

It's moments like these: on a cold lonely silent hilltop, in hot tropical Singapore with a wailing kid choking on his own spit, that the true test of a wife comes to bear; and I can only see beauty, in so many different ways hidden in the grind of daily living, shine forth like a ray of light against grey skies -- and I know the good days are always here, because she is here. My heart quickens.

Now if only the kid will shut up.