Five Years Later, The Crisis is Over.

My little boy has tears in the knees of his jeans from driving cars off of our lawn and onto our sidewalk. He trikes up the incline to the train tracks with just a push or two from my foot. He speaks in songs, as when Mom's old friend asked him if he had a girlfriend, and he pressed the appropriate song on his Dynavox, from The Beatles: Oh I have got another girl. Letters and presents from kindergarten classmates travel home in his bookbag -- a yellow bandana with a marker design, a puzzle created with scissors and paper, a note that says, simply, "I Love You." He pulls himself onto the couch to relax, laying low and slumped, like a little Al Bundy. He gives hugs and kisses, makes jokes like brushing his teeth with a hairbrush and brushing his hair with a toothbrush. He is fine, healthy, and well. Thank God.