Extra sweet coffee Sunday

Four hours of sleep has an undeniable weight to it — not the clean exhaustion of a good night cut short, but the gritty, slow-blinking kind that sits behind your eyes and makes the morning feel like something you're wading through rather than walking into.

Yesterday had been Aerie's first birthday. There were balloons and people and the chaos of a one-year-old discovering that cake exists. They hadn't gotten home until eight, and then there were the hours after, the quiet unwinding that stretched toward midnight before anyone thought to check the clock. Mimi had said she wasn't going to church. It had seemed reasonable. It had seemed like the only sensible thing.

But something got said, and she changed her mind — the way people sometimes do when someone they love gently names what they actually believe.

Now the coffee is extra sweet, the way Mimi makes it when she knows you need it. Aerie is on the couch in her party dress, still wearing it like a small dignitary who has not yet been informed the occasion is over, watching Mickey Mouse with the total absorption only a one-year-old can manage. And Mimi is already moving — shuffling boxes from the party, stacking things, finding her way back to herself through the motion of her hands.

She had thought she had nothing left. She was wrong about that. The reserves were there all along, waiting for her to take one step forward before they would show themselves.

There is something in all of it — the dress, the boxes, the coffee that is too sweet and exactly right — that feels less like a family barely making it out the door and more like a family held together by something that does not require them to be at full strength. The tired is real. The going is also real. And sitting there on the couch, cup warm in hand, watching Mimi move and Aerie glow, it turns out that running on fumes is still running.

It's enough to bring to church. It might even be the right thing to bring.