in which my mother climbed the stairs with more alacrity than usual...

...at 5:30 AM this morning.

she paused in the doorway, and i spoke up, assuring her that i was (well, sort of) awake. she started babbling, and crossed to the window: "Get up... hurry... Chris, Get up, you need to see. Hurry! Oh my God... Look. Oh my God..."

when i reached her side - a whole three steps, but you try going from being sound asleep to walking around at 5:30 AM on a Saturday morning - she was trembling and pointing out my window. "Look... there, do you see them? Three of them! I was downstairs, and I had just finished my prayers, and I glanced out the window, and suddenly one of them walked by the window. Then another. Then another. I got up slowly - I didn't want to scare them - to look at them. Can you see them? Aren't they beautiful?"

I assured her that I could see the (shadowy outlines of) deer (though they were, by now, sixty feet away in a neighbor's yard) and that they were beautiful.

i held my mother. she was still shaking, and crying.

"It was just so wonderful, to see them walk right by the window like that." she looked up at me and added "Don't tell your brothers. They see them all the time over there, and they'd think I was crazy."

i assured her i wouldn't.

we stood for a few minutes, watching the deer in the dark, before she hugged me and went back downstairs.

--

she's not crazy.

just getting more like me. actually, this may in fact rebut the previous sentence.

still, where along the line did we switch? when did it go from me becoming more and more like my mother, to her becoming more and more like me?