And so your day begins when you wake up with dew on your back. Warm hands pull you to your feet and a warm voice says, You are a duffer, Mr Frodo, wanderin' out here in the night and lying down up under the big oak. And you smile, although your head feels a little unsteady now that you're standing, but it's good to smile because it's good to hear the words said with humour rather than concern. Such behaviour is not nearly so worrisome in summer.
The pair of you go inside and another warm voice with warm hands says, Grass stains on another nightshirt, I should have known better than to end up with a gardener and a dreamer who likes to fall asleep outdoors. Grass stains! They'll finish me off for certain.
And then four warm hands pull the grass-stained nightshirt up over your head and remind you of being young almost beyond memory, and the way your mother would change your clothes with careful hands. There's something right and sad and good in comparing the two occasions, for love so unconditional comes to few people even once in their life, and you have somehow had the fortune to find these two warm soft bodies just when it seemed certain all your luck was spent.
I'm so lucky to have you, my Sam, my Rosie, you say, blinking eyes that sting with hot tear-prickles.
Now now, it's too early in the morning for that, come and have your breakfast, your Rosie says, but your Sam rubs your back gently and plants a kiss on the shoulder that isn't always slightly sore. And oh, how did you end up so lucky, what do two children of the sun and earth so warm and soft and solid and warm want with you, with your tremulous hands and sharp-angled face and cold sallow skin? And yet somehow they do want you, even after all that has been and might have been.
Elanor is still too young and sweet to resent the tiny creature that smells of soap and milk and lies in her old cradle. She likes having a big grown-up bed of her own, and you know she's only on the other side of the wall and safe and snug every night but it's so strange to think that your family is now too big to sleep in one room. Elanor, mischeviously, has decided not to begin talking grown-up language yet and you could listen to her conversations with baby Frodo for hours, the cheerful chatter in a tongue you've long forgotten.
Later in the morning when the dew has been soaked up by the earth and pulled up into the sky by the sun, you all lie up under the oak and watch the sky. Your heads lie close together, you and your Sam and your Rosie, while Elanor and baby Frodo nap contentedly against the folds of their mother's skirts. You're the spokes of a friendly sort of wheel, toes pointed out in three directions and hands linked together. If there were clouds above, you'd be watching for patterns and shapes in them, but there aren't any clouds, and the storm that's gathering near the horizon looks like nothing but a storm. You don't mind the storm, though, for it's far off and you have learnt not to borrow trouble.
~