Sixteen years ago, I nearly left this world for the next, taking our youngest son along for the ride.

Complications set in during the labor and delivery part, and let's just say that the birthing room was full of a LOT of health-care professionals, hanging onto our ankles, making sure we didn't slip away.

Which (obviously) we didn't.

Thank you, health-care professionals! To this day I STILL want to kiss all of you on the lips!

Shortly after the baby and I were released from the hospital, my lovely friend Shauna stopped by to visit.

We sat on my porch swing so we could rock the baby and talk. Moments into our conversation, she stopped and regarded me closely.

"You're different," she said at last. According to her, I had the look of someone living in an altered state.

Leave it to the ever-intuitive Shauna to see deep inside me: I did, in fact, feel like a visitor in my own skin. And like any visitor, I couldn't help but notice with new eyes the stunning physical landscape around me.

The May fresh sky. The inky blue mountains at twilight. The latticework of small leaves hanging over Avenues streets. The poppies shimmering pink and orange in the breeze. The intricate fluff of dandelions.

I often sat on the porch in those spring days right after the baby was born, feeling the flash of sun on my scalp and listening to birds, snatches of songs blaring from a car radio, kids, dogs, early sprinklers, wind chimes, an occasional clap of thunder and distant whistles.

And of course there was the baby — he of the tiny ears and curling fingers and fragrant downy head.

There was the weight of him in my arms and heart, and I felt the preciousness of his life, my life, every life down to the slimmest blade of grass.

I'm not kidding.

And I promised myself in those early postpartum days that I would find a way to stay in that altered state of presence, of gratitude and grace.

But of course I didn't. I couldn't, probably, in spite of my best intentions. Life has a way of becoming ordinary again, even if something extraordinary has happened to you.

And before you know it, there you are — shopping for groceries and folding laundry, preparing lesson plans and making dinner, dropping off kids and picking them up, making lists and losing them, cleaning up after the pets, digging dried Play-Doh out of the carpet, tipping the pizza delivery guy, helping someone with homework — going through the paces of your days only partly aware of the worlds teeming around you.

But at least there is the remembering part.

Each year, as my youngest boy celebrates another birthday, I think of the day he arrived. I see it all over again, played out for me in private detail on an invisible stage.

And always I receive this fleeting little gift — the memory of those moments after on the porch when everything around me was bathed in a different light.

E-mail: acannon@desnews.com