There are mice living in our backyard. We often catch glimpses of them scampering across the patio, hiding in the grass, running between those trees we planted across the berm on the other side of our fence one hot Saturday afternoon two Septembers ago.

John and I are afraid the mice will attract snakes like the one I discovered on our front porch last year, like the one that surprised me this spring as I was unfurling the garden hose and turning the spigot on to fill the little plastic pool the neighbor had dragged across the grass, into our backyard. But Archie, Kit and Jack are simply excited to see those mice running from here to there, and then back again.

“I saw another mouse on your porch,” my mom told me this morning when I got back to the house. She’d been watching Kit and Jack while I was at the gym.

I sighed and rolled my eyes before I answered. “I know. John told me to call our exterminator.”

That’s when Kit, who was standing in the kitchen and looking out our patio doors into the backyard, spoke up. “Excuse me, Nana?” My kids never address me when my mother’s around. They prefer her attention to mine when it’s theirs for the taking. “I have a good idea.”

Kit still stutters when she’s got a complex thought to share, so it took her a while to get the next little bit out. “Why don’t we make a pie and put it outside and when a mouse comes to eat it we can just get ’em?” She jumped up in the air as she finished her sentence, my daughter did, and pulled her arms and hands in close to her chest as if she were plucking something out of the air right there in the middle of our kitchen. She laughed, and Jack laughed, and my mother and I nodded at each other with our eyes opened wide before we agreed aloud that Kit’s idea was, in fact, a good one.

Although Kit and Jack still have a couple weeks before they begin their new school year, Archie started classes last week. I gave both Kit and Jack one of those snack packs of pretzels to eat in the station wagon this afternoon as we left the house to pick up Archie from school. Sometimes they’ll fall asleep on our drive across town, and when that happens it usually means Kit and Jack will cry and whine and throw their flailing bodies all over the hallway while we’re walking to Archie’s classroom to bring him home from school. But those snacks, sometimes they’ll stave off the sleep.

So today I’m driving and the twins are eating their pretzels, and I’m stopped at an intersection when Jack holds up a pretzel in a way he knows I’ll be able to see it by looking in the rearview mirror. “Hey, Mom. This pretzel looks like a letter B.” A beat or two later Jack spoke again, correcting himself, “No. I think it really looks like a number 8.”

Later, when we’re home again, Archie retreats to the kids’ playroom upstairs, turns on the television, and then closes the room’s double doors. A little later I go into the playroom to check on him and that’s when I find that Archie has tossed the trains and trucks to and fro, dumped the dolls across the floor, and toppled the table in the corner of the room. When I look to him for an explanation, before I’m able to utter a word, Archie says, “Is it funny?”

“The mess?” I want clarification.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“No, it’s not funny.” I am not laughing, but he is so hard that his sides are shaking.

Before I leave the room I want to know how his day went at school. I’ve read the teacher report in Archie’s folder and saw that he “had trouble following directions today.” But all Archie has to say about my inquiry is, “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Would someone please tell my oldest boy that he’s going on six, not sixteen?

Kit and Jack’s birthday is on Sunday. They will be four years old. We were at the beach, on the Isle of Palms, a few weeks ago and I wondered where my babies had gone while watching my youngest two children play in the sand. Jack played swamp wave with his cousins in the surf, and Kit made friends with a little girl who was swimming in the same tidal pool we’d discovered. “These are my parents,” she told the girl as they made their way around the edge of the water together. “And this is my grandma,” she introduced my mother, too, moving a cupped palm in her direction.

And Archie… My God, Archie. He faced the sea like its fearless foe. He’d stand in the surf, staring out toward the horizon, walking forward, and when a wave managed to knock him down he’d get right back up and charge on again. I don’t know what he was doing, or where he thought he was going, but he was committed and courageous and humored by it all to the point of hilarity.

My parents rented the beach house we stayed in, and John cooked our meals, and we moms and dads, aunts and uncles, my parents, too, shared childcare responsibilities. The kids were mostly happy, and Jack kept asking again and again where John’s parents were. He wanted to know why my parents, his grandma and grandpa, would do all these things for him, but why he didn’t know John’s parents at all.

“Because they’re dead,” John tried to explain to Jack, but still Jack didn’t understand.

“What does dead mean?” he pressed.

So one afternoon John and I piled Archie, Kit and Jack into our station wagon and drove over the bridges and down the roads that connect the Isle of Palms to James Island. John showed the kids where he lived, where he played, where he went to school. And then he told them stories all the way to the cemetery where we got out of the car, where we took our children’s hands, and picked our way through the headstones until we found the ones we were looking for. John explained that this is where his parents were, where Archie, Kit and Jack’s grandparents are, and John showed them his grandparents’ graves, too. The kids had questions, of course, and John and I tried to sum up those questions with a simple explanation, “Well, they’re with God now.”

“You mean they’re in our hearts?” Kit wanted to know. That is what she’s learned at school about God, after all.

“Oh! I have them right here in my heart!” Jack hollered, his hands against the center of his chest as he jumped up and down, up and down. His excitement was palpable.

Archie repeated quietly, “Heart.”

Where have they come from, these children of mine? The babies they were are long gone and we are marching forward, moving on. Thank God, wherever He is, whoever He is, we are still here, the five of us, putting each foot in front of the other.