Pizza Night

I'm rolling the dough in the kitchen, listening to Pandora as my life moves around me: my husband talking on the phone to a colleague in the other room; the boys playing video games; my daughter's dress-up heels clomping against the floor as she pushes her mini grocery cart down the hallway. I hear all of this and don't hear it. I'm stretching and rolling the dough, hands bathed in flour, listening to the music. The tomato sauce is cooling on the stovetop. It's Friday and it's Pizza Night.

Fridays have changed.

Every now and then I have an urge to flee. To un-tether. Bust out. Not for good, but for a moment. To travel back to a Friday night when I was a girl, a woman, swiping my path through the world to all the lavish noise of freedom.

I have loved my life. I loved that life. But here's the odd and fantastic truth: It's Friday, I'm in my kitchen, and there is no other place more wildly wonderful than right here.

As a woman, this is the course traveled. We throw ourselves out there, trying to grab what life places before us -- the things desired and the returning hope to be desired -- and we arrive, if all goes incredibly well, with this:

Pizza Night.

A man on the phone in the other room, who -- in a stroke of the heart's mad genius -- we were lucky enough to choose. Children downstairs and upstairs who exhaust us, drain and vex us, and fill us with more riotous love than we ever dreamed possible. Everything we didn't really know we so entirely wanted.

I am no longer young. All of my massive yearnings have brought me to this place. I have a husband, two sons, and a daughter. I listen to music that is both new and old. I stir in ways no lesser than earlier days when my movements were bigger, less hinged. It's Friday night.

I'm rolling out the dough while the music plays.

Life is so quietly, so commonly, complete.

With a Perspective, I'm Susan Dix Lyons.

Susan Dix Lyons lives in St. Helena.