Cool quiet morning

From my front porch, I can see that the birch grove is just starting to turn to its golden hues, catching the reflected light off the fields, not too many leaves have fallen. My grandson comes up from his room and sits down on the stoop, eating honeyed toast made of bread his mother baked yesterday. The door closes gently behind him, quieting the murmur of voices down there. I take a deep breath, hoping to enjoy it, cough a bit, then a bit more, and hunch my shoulders and shudder until the Calm hits me and I can unkink my muscles and look out again at the grove, and the fields, and the town beyond. Ethan, for a boy of eight, is listening hard but staying silent. He moves as if to stomp his feet and push off, stays on the stoop, shifts his legs, leans over, picks at a splinter from the board.
The sun beats down, even at eight, but there's a good westerly today and it won't be getting too hot. I breathe in, not as deeply, and listen for my daughter inside, humming to herself as she always does. Always a tune, something, some fragment or symphony or tribute. I set my chair rocking and let it take me, back and forth. Ethan's tapping on the stair, idly, but in time to his distant mother's song, sharing with her the backdrop of their world where ever he goes.
It's won't last. He's eight now, but next year he'll be nine, and the year after that ten, just like that, and one day he won't come out of his room with her song in his heart but will just stay down there, like his sister did, day after day, talking to her friends, ignoring her family, alone and together in that cave of lights and voices she accreted around herself down there only coming out for meals and then whatever was quickest, easiest to make and get back there and even then a halo of their lives around her head never letting go not even for an instant of laughs together and songs together that we could hardly hear and just watch her go back into her room, her cave. He sits out here on the porch with me and I don't even have to ask him to look with his eyes and feel with his hands the sun on the fields and the leaves and the breeze and the pits in these wooden steps worn of decades of tracking the grit of the street into our house.