A couple of weeks after our wedding, K and I went for a walk in the fields of Lipnica Wielka, the village in southern Poland that was my home for seven years, our home for one. We’d returned home from our honeymoon at Balaton, moved her stuff to our small apartment, and begun the process of settling down.

The day after I took this picture, I wrote in my journal,

Finally everything seems to have settled down a bit. [K] and I have moved into the apartment; we’ve done some decorating; we’ve had dinner here; we’ve gone to [K’s] folks’ house for Sunday lunch already. And here it is, just before seven, and I’m writing in my journal. Everything’s back to “normal” in other words, but that “normal” isn’t quite like it ever was before.

It’s odd how one’s sense of “normal” changes so easily. For several years, we had a “normal” newlywed life: traveling, having parties, meeting friends for dinner, staying up.

Then L came along, and for a while, getting no real sleep and always having an infant in our arms was “normal.” Getting up multiple times in one night became an expected routine, and it often had its own pleasantness: there is an unparalleled intimacy involved in helping an infant — getting a bottle, changing a diaper, calming a nightmare — when the rest of the city is asleep.

Now “normal” is “No!” and “No, no, no!” It’s “I want it!” and tantrums. It’s dealing with independence in a still-dependent little girl. It can be more frustrating than getting up for the fourth time with an infant.

Soon enough, I know “normal” will be something entirely different, and it occurs to me, as it has to many through the millenia, that perhaps a static normal is not normal.