I raise my head from the page, turning to look out into the garden through the open half of the stable door, and there, in the dappled shade of the lemon tree, is my husband with our three treasures. The truffles. Our triplets. My little tribe.
I imagine that maybe Tallulah couldn’t decide whom she wanted to play with the most, so she brought both beloved brothers along. Of course, being children and not remote-controlled fantasies, they came with their own distinct and perfect personalities.
Sometimes when my little girl gazes at us with her penetrating, curious stare, raising her right eyebrow in amusement, my mother goes quite cold, because it is my father’s gaze. Other days, I watch Tallulah clanking down the road wearing a green velvet ball gown, pink hat and Pnina’s green Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Then I think, dear God, I’ve given birth to my sister, all glamorous and stylish.
And sometimes, when Gidon Greg, my big boy, shrieks with excitement, wriggles with joy, laughs for no apparent reason, gets lost in a reverie listening to Pachelbel’s Canon while studying dinosaur books, when he invites me into the fantasy world where he spends so much time, a world inhabited by dragons and fantasy ‘brothers’, he reminds me of the glorious magnificence of his late uncle’s craziness, the much-missed, much-loved Greg.
The littlest baby, Samuel Jacob, the last one to come out of my tummy, is dark and brooding. Quite an eccentric little magnet, he seems to provoke adoration from the most unlikely sources. His hair is coiled into black spirals like the night sky in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. He has a wicked sense of humour, and his black eyes have the same gentle allure as his father’s.
I’ve come to think that we reincarnate in the lives of our children. We, or aspects of each of us, are carried through time on this earth in our children and our children’s children. Mind you, they are who they are today, but they may change completely by next week. However, I doubt that they will ever be anything other than perfect.
What delights and astonishes me is that we don’t merely live to tell the tale. We live to watch movies, gossip with girlfriends, spend mornings gardening and afternoons gazing out at the ocean as white sails cruise languidly by. We live to love and laugh and cry and reproduce and read and write and make love and eat popcorn and drink green tea and sit as families around Georgian dining-room tables. To light candles and thank whatever gods may be out there for our unconquerable souls, and to bask in the great glow of faith.