cling

“Daddy?” she said.

“Yes Mia?”

“I just noticed that I have a booger in my mouth and I don’t know why.”

Awesome, I know. I’ve told Sarah that if I’d known just how funny these people were going to be I’d have made them way sooner, and it’s true. And this exchange, delivered with such a guileless, How about that? expression of discovery, was just perfect, so much so that I wanted to – had to – wipe it on my sleeve, and save it for later.

She’s still a little kid, of course. I need to remind myself of that sometimes. Not that there’s any real confusion, not with her still-missing front teeth (fourteen months and counting), or the way she seems utterly incapable of grasping the notion that I can’t follow a phone conversation when she’s standing in front of me asking for permission to wear feet pajamas. Some things just jump out.

But we’ve had her for so long now, and she’s changed so much, that it’s hard to imagine that we’re still at the beginning of the arc. She’s four years from middle school, ten years from college. She’s halfway to high school. Soon she’ll develop a life entirely independent of us. She’ll push away, as she should. Boys will happen.

I squint and grimace and turn away at the thought. It will all happen eventually, and it should all happen. But I’m not always great at letting go. I’m not always great at marching forward. There’s a lot I’d like to put off. So the unexpected discovery of wayward boogers is a relief. She’s growing, but she’s far from grown. We’re not there yet.

There are other comforts. We were at the park back in August. We were early for camp drop-off, and she asked if we could go to the playground to wait. We had 10 minutes to play, maybe 15. She explored the play structure while I hid in the half-shade of the latticework above the picnic tables.

She called out to me. “Come play with me.”

I demurred. The heat, Mia. The heat. It had been mid-’90s and sticky all week, and the last thing I wanted to do was chase Mia around a Habitrail.

“But why are you wearing long sleeves?” she asked, and she had a point. I have to go to work, Sweetie. I’m going after I drop you off.

“Oh,” she said. “Is it dress-up day at work?” In a manner of speaking, I suppose it was.

She clung to me that day at drop-off. That week, actually – all week, she held on when it was time to let go. Nothing heartbreaking – she just squeezed my hand and pulled me close and asked me not to leave her just yet. Not yet. And I didn’t.

She still leaves the house in mismatched outfits with her hair a bird’s nest, completely oblivious to convention. She still asks me to close the guest room door because the green light blinking on the wi-fi router scares her. She still sleeps with Pig and Other Pig clutched close, and she still needs a night song and a butterfly massage before she’ll do it. She still asks me to stay a minute, just a minute, to snuggle.

There will come a time when I’ll deliver her to school, or send her off to bed, and she’ll dart away. I know it’ll happen, I know it has to happen. I just hope I’ll know enough not to hold on when it’s time to let go.

Because there are already days when I miss her childhood, and it’s still here.

 

booger wonderland

Night before last. Max is in bed. I’m reading a story, and something green and fantastic emerges from his nose. I grab it – because parenting is super glamorous and I am its most glamorous practitioner – and walk to the bathroom to put it into a tissue and wash my hands. Max gets angry to the point of tears. He wanted me to put it on his hand so that he could put it on the tissue.

I bet you’ve never had that argument. I bet that’s a brand-new argument.

 

 

a good lesson

Mia has a habit of denuding plants. She stands in front of a bush and strips off leaves, her fist clamped around a branch like she’s stripping wires. It’s a mostly harmless habit, except that it tends to leave our patio littered with detritus from our Japanese boxwoods, and it tends to leave our Japanese boxwoods a little less boxy. 

I’ve told her to stop enough times – sometimes in elevated tones – and the message finally sank in. This morning, she and Max were on the patio, playing with some boxwood leaves, and she turned to me and explained that she’d found those leaves – she didn’t take them off the bush, so I shouldn’t be mad. I decided to take the opportunity to paint some gray shades, explaining that the prohibition on picking leaves is not absolute. If you’re going to use the leaves, that’s fine, I said – but you can’t just stand there and pull them off because it’s fun to pull them off. “Sometimes it’s fine to pull the leaves,” I began, before Max stepped in helpfully to finish the sentence.

“If you don’t see us,” he said. “If you don’t see us do it, we can do it. Right?”

 

squirrels

Mia brought home a bean sprout that became a bean plant, and that inspired us. So we planted forget-me-nots, and marigolds, and poppies. And chives and cilantro, and something else that I forgot to label, and since it never took, just like the flowers never took, I’ll never know what it was.

We’re learning.

And then we planted cucumbers in a big bowl, and they thrived, and then our gardener told me to take them out of the bowl and put them in the ground, which I did, over near the front of the house, behind the wall, near the apricot tree, and they struggled in the 100-degree heat, but made it through, until sometime between yesterday morning and this morning, when a squirrel, or maybe a team of squirrels – probably tweaker squirrels – came and ate them. All but one. Which will probably be gone by morning.

Damn tweaker squirrels.

Also: We went on a hike, and we brought along Max’s cowlick.

  

 

bloom

There’s so much happening and not much happening, but I’ve got to write something here because lord knows I don’t want my Evel Knievel obit top-of-page for the entire month of December. Cripes, how maudlin.

So here’s something.

 

It’s a flower. It’s an orchid, I guess, though I know nothing about flowers other than that Sarah’s favorite are tulips (she’s Dutch, you see), and I tend to kill them. It’s nothing personal, really – I like flowers just fine – but flowers are plants, and I kill plants (I’m a vegetarian, you see). It’s a thing. I’ve just got kind of a brown thumb.

Luckily, so does Sarah, so I don’t feel so all alone. Of course, that just means that we live a largely plantless life. We’ve got three of them in our house. One is a rubber-type thingy with big wide fronds that we’ve had for years. In fact, I’m totally open to the possibility that that one’s a fake and we haven’t figured it out yet, because really, no plant should live that long under my supervision. There’s also a big, braided ferny thing that ebbs and flows, and seems to be flowing right now, which is something I’m pretty proud of.

And then there’s that flower. We got it four years ago from D. and D., who came by to watch the Super Bowl a couple months after we moved out here. They brought the plant, with the orchid, and we promptly put it in the kitchen, by the window, near the sink, next to the drying rack.

For the first few months we watered it regularly, feeding it the pink orchid powder I picked up at the nursery, until the orchid fell off its stem, the stem died, and the plant around it shriveled up. Mission accomplished, we set to watering it every whenever-we-remember, usually just pouring out our half-drunk glasses of water into it as we washed the dishes. Somehow, the plant survived, though the orchid didn’t. It’s been three-plus years, and we haven’t seen petal nor stamen of the thing.

Until now.

Now there’s a flower happening.

Does that happen? Three years later, after no flower, there’s a flower? Is that even possible?

Our neighbors Dave and Heidi took care of our plants while we were in Switzerland. When I told them about the flower, Dave just nodded. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Sarah says it’s a metaphor. She says it’s a symbol of our rebirth, or our growth, or our something – I’m not sure what, and let’s be frank, she hasn’t really thought this out. But it feels like something. And it did appear to us on the weekend of my graduation, so it’s tempting to assign greater meaning to it. Like, maybe it’s a sign that I’m about to really blossom into something beautiful and delicate! (Nauseous yet?)

Or maybe there’s a different lesson here, something about a blind squirrel and a nut. I don’t know. All I know is that there’s a flower now and there wasn’t one before.

You should come visit it.