Before six

Much excitement, little energy, less time. That's been, more or less, the state of things over the past week, during which we took two intercontinental flights, enjoyed a stay in Olympic-saturated Winchester, arrived home in Baltimore only to watch some of our closest friends move to Wisconsin and Vancouver... and, yes, rose with Cleo for three straight days before 3:30 a.m., in a punishing vigil organized by the priests of jetlag.

But now things are beginning, beginning to feel normal again. Cleo slept until 5:45 yesterday, which felt more than civilized, and while L. tackled the mountain of tasks that had piled up on her work desk, my daughter and I enjoyed a relatively easy summer day in Baltimore. We fed sparrows flecks of bread on the docks, we played Yahtzee over frozen yogurt, we waded in the Hampden swimming pool, and Cleo rediscovered her watercolors, and produced a touching composition for her mommy. Heck, by the end of the day the lawn was even mowed. So, no, we're not Olympic athletes, but after 19 hours of flying we're still standing, and ready to embrace a steamy August.

But we're also slightly different, in a range of ways. L. is aware that she likely won't lead the Cape Town trip next year, and so she's beginning to reframe her view of her job - beginning with an upcoming fall talk on the subject in the Bay Area. Similarly, with my book coming out in less than two months, I'm feeling about for promising new directions - and wait, relatedly, to hear back from Nka about my first piece of criticism on sub-Saharan African contemporary art. And Cleo? Well, she seems to have suddenly grown into a pleasant and relatively well-mannered little lady - who acquired, somewhere in the past two weeks, a new voice that is definitely less squeak than speaking style.

Here's what I mean. Did you see, in a June New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones' characterization of Norah Jones' voice? "Jones," he wrote, "has one of the most textured and tactile voices in pop - it has real heft, even when played at low volume on laptop speakers. Her vocals are a cottony mix of breath and surprisingly low pitches; the voice reassures even before her lyrics sink in." That's about as effective a description of a voice as I've seen, and of course it celebrates one of the most popular voices in contemporary song. I won't try to echo it, then, in describing Cleo's - but suffice it to say that my little girl has recently been speaking in a slightly raspy, reedy, husky voice that seems both to imply an arrival into a new maturity and the residue of life in a continent that left all three of us, at points, a bit feeble. Cleo seems to be in good health - no worries there, we think - but I take the recent change in her vocal tone as governed by something akin to recovery. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote that "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Yes, I think: and it's that persistent strength in Cleo's voice that I heard today, at 5:11, when she strode into our room and said, confidently, "Um, Mommy? Today I slept until six." Such a voice, too, can reassure even before the content sinks in.