But even the rooftops and power poles and electric lines poking up into the sky couldn’t block the beauty. The whole southwestern sky was the color of ripe raspberries, a whole bowl of them, spilled out and illuminated, as if they were lit from behind, or within.

I stood in the church parking lot and watched that vibrant pink drain from the sky. It faded really fast.

Not an hour before, my mom and I had been looking at baby pictures of Jane. Mama shook her head and said, “I just don’t remember Jane as a a baby.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “I didn’t realize how much Luke looks like her.” How could I look at Luke and not see the resemblance? How could I forget something so unforgettable as my only daughter’s baby face?

My memory fades so fast, and the days fade even faster, and I know that tired as I am, I will likely have almost no memories of this first year of the boys’ life, and that makes me sad. It makes me want to hold on.

It makes me want to pay attention.

I rush far too often and forget to pay attention to this moment right here right now. But you simply can’t rush a nursing baby – or a sleeping one. Being on the twins’ schedule has meant slowing down. And slowing has given me more space, more time to pay attention.

Attention is something we generally lack around here. We’re all worried and distracted by many things. But really, only one thing is needful.

The way my mother sits, legs crossed, in the rocking chair, working a crossword puzzle.

The way my daughter’s hair curls softly around her face as she sits beside me on the sofa, looking at a book. The dimple in her chin. The arch of her perfect eyebrows. Even the bug bites on her legs that she’s picked till they’ve bled and scabbed over.

The way Ben plays with my fingers while he nurses. The cool softness of his cheeks. The soft down of his hair.

The way Luke shrieks with delight when he shakes the rattle he’s managed to pick up. His chubby cheeks and chin. His Buddha belly.

The way Jack’s hair falls across his forehead and over his ears. The small scar beside his nose. His joyful singing as he sits at the table, drawing.

This moment. It’s all we have. And if we don’t notice it, we won’t remember it.

Because it fades really fast.

I brushed it off, saying I’d had a rash much like it when I was pregnant with Jane.

That afternoon, I worked for a bit in the yard, pruning our out-of-control mock orange tree. When I stopped after maybe 40 minutes (okay, it might have been 50), I noticed that the veins in my hands and arms were swollen to twice their normal size, bulging grotesquely through my skin—and the rash stood out in stark and scary-red relief against the blue of my veins.

As I stared at my hands and forearms, all bulging blue veins and tiny red spots against pale, pale skin, I remembered Brian’s comment about the platelet count and I just knew I had leukemia or multiple myeloma and that we wouldn’t be able to treat it till after the babies were born and by then it would be too late because I would die mere days after the twins’ birth and Jack and Jane would be devastated and their little hearts would break and poor Doug would be left alone with four children, two of them just babies, and I wouldn’t get to see my children grow up and my twins wouldn’t even remember me, and it was all so sad that I sat there, hypochondriac freak that I am, and cried.

Sometimes, having a vivid imagination is a curse.

When I woke the next morning, it was once more grabbing me by the heart, this fear that I was dying. I knew it was irrational. But you can’t reason with irrational fear. It just is. And boy, that morning, it really was.

Then I read Ann Voscamp’s blog post for the day, in which she said, “Fear is the fleeing ahead.” And I realized that’s exactly what I was doing: feeling afraid not because the present is scary but because the future is or, rather, might be; because I was trying to guess and prepare for The Next Bad Thing.

But in truth my life at that particular moment was good, and I was missing out on its goodness, on God’s presence in the present because I was fleeing ahead.

I stopped running. I sat in the moment. And each time the fear came that day, I remembered Ann’s words and returned to the present and started counting the blessings of that moment.

I ended up having a pretty good day.

(By the way—low platelet count sometimes occurs in late pregnancy and has nothing to do with cancer. Also, I don’t have a low platelet count. I know this, of course, because I went to the doctor and asked them to do a blood test. Said blood test showed something far more prosaic: I’m not eating enough iron. I don’t know how that’s possible, given that I eat enough meat these days to make Dr. Atkins himself (may he rest in peace) positively green with envy, but I guess it’s time to go gnaw on a skillet…)