Every parent knows gracefully tired when they see it.
It might look like a warm bath, a long walk, or a tired dog drinking from a bowl of cold water.
Sometimes grace is two Advil.
Often, I find similar idle pleasures in simply coming home after an extended time away.
And I have found the same grace when I frequented my parents back porch swing on summer evenings during graduate school.
As any parent knows, a state of grace can simply be a group of happy kids at the end of a long day.
Everyone was rubber-legged with fatigue and effort but buoyant too, and none of the children fought or cried, and that, at the end of a very long day, with three tired children under the age of five, is a state of grace.
-Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
