To all the boys I've known before

It is late evening, a magic time underneath the maples that line the center of our boulevard. We mosey south, with the setting sun on our right, toward home.

He carries my soup ladle carefully in his dirt-caked hand, its bowl filled with acorns and seeds for his birdhouse. His feet in his dirty green Keens stay precisely on the path that a thousand little boy feet have worn to hard-packed earth and roots. I wonder about them. All those little boys. All those mothers brought to their knees by slanting sunlight on blond highlights. This neighborhood is one hundred years old. He steps in the footprints of boys who have grown to men and died and their sons have grown to men and died and their sons have grown to men and have little boys of their own.

Right there, beside that twisted root. The footprint of a two-year-old boy in 1924, fated to die on a boat in World War II. His four-year-old sister will have a boy in 1945 and give him his uncle's name and her mother, the namesake's grandmother, will pretend, with all but her eyes, that his bouncing curls and round knees ease her heart instead of pierce it through. She'll coo and love and cuddle and scold and never let on, not even once, that inside her head, when her daughter and grandson wander under the maples across from her shady porch retreat, the screaming is so loud that she fears they will hear. I was like you, I was just like you, I thought little boys were for kisses and walks and school, for love and marriage and grandchildren, to be cherished, not wasted, riddled with bullets and left, floating.

And there. Over there, under the big maple with the crevice between its roots, where we imagine fairies hide. The faint outline of another footprint. Another two-year-old boy born in 1932. A lucky year, he will be too young for wars. He knew our lost uncle as a self-important ten-year-old who stopped sometimes to show a feather, an acorn, an egg, countless treasures hidden in the palm of his hand. This little boy remembers him, and others gone, and goes to medical school before he joins the Air Force. His fourth little boy is born while he stitches other boys back together in Germany in 1965.

And that fourth-born boy lives a quiet life in a sweet 20s craftsman not far from the boulevard where his father grew up. He is an elementary school principal, very in love with his second wife, who leads his eleven-year-old boy down this boulevard when they ride their bikes early on Saturday mornings. This way again, Dad, the boy complains. He doesn't answer. He likes this maple-lined street when it is heavy with summer. We hear them laugh, sometimes, through our open window as they turn our corner. Still drowsy, but mindful of the bright sun and the baby's coos and the first murmurs of little boys in the room next door.

It feels very hopeless and still hopeful. There is no joy, no pain, no milestone, no birthday, no horror, no quiet moment, no shame, no pride, no grief, no sweetness, no hug, no path that some other mother hasn't walked before me.

It is the solid center of this phenomenon called "mommy blogging," don't you think? The ability to reach out and touch another story, run your fingers down the words, see your own grief, your own speechless wonder reflected back at you.

He is two. Quinn is two. For three more hours and twenty-seven minutes he is two. He wants a pink cake and I can't wait to bake it with him, but I still sit here crying. You understand that, don't you?