Poem for Tuesday

A Little Tooth
By Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

--------

My neighborhood got about six inches of snow overnight, and my entire family had a snow day. Paul worked from home. Daniel slept till about 11 and spent as much of the rest of the day playing video games as we would permit. Adam got up early to play Superpoke Pets, went sledding with his friends, and made himself cup-a-soup when he got back. I worked on invitations to his Bar Mitzvah in the morning, then in the afternoon we all watched WALL-E (which I had decided to order with an Amazon.com gift certificate after we rented it last month) and the extras on the DVD. So it was a quiet, peaceful, not-very-eventful day for anyone but the cats, who are still checking out their new cat furniture, and who are always confused when there are extra people in the house during the day who might at any moment open a can of tuna fish!


Daisy and Cinnamon check out the new cat tree...or, more specifically, Daisy checks out Cinnamon.


It is after all very difficult to decide who should get to sleep on which level.


Rosie, naturally, is above fighting over such things. (Plus she is too large to leap to the top level in a single bound the way the others can do.)


Daisy is willing to sleep pretty much anywhere, provided it's warm and she can race into the kitchen on a moment's notice if someone might feed her.


You can get away with almost anything when you have a face like this.


This is what the deck looked like at about 8 a.m. The snow kept falling until about 11, stopped for a while, then fell in brief squalls again a couple of hours later.


It's supposed to be in the teens tonight, so we are hoping the trees are not weighed down enough for the branches to break.