A Morning, A Moment

Liko has found a pair of long Johns, and is carefully patting a small brass cup, top and bottom, to listen to the set or ringing noises it makes on the table. A tiny metal teapot next to her is half-filled with milk. The cool liquid inside makes a dewey shadow on the outside, and Liko refills her small cups. Two toy cats are discarded on the floor, their chins suspiciously milk-drippy.

Liko's two blond French braid's are fraying. Earlier this morning, after we dropped the big kids off on the long morning trek from North Eugene to South Eugene, through clogged arterial highways and wide fog swept river roads, backdropped with gradations of mist-fading pines, Liko sat on my tummy as I lay on the couch, and her blond hairs flew around her like a wild halo, her bangs in her eyes.

We watched two squirrels in the back yard. One weighed down a drooping sunflower, and it bounced near the ground while the squirrel worked. Then pop! The sunflower head was off! The other squirrel stepped through my new garden box, poking at the fresh dirt and passing between my newly planted kale and fennel starts. Liko asked if Nagini, RJ's snake, could eat a squirrel. Or is it too big so she would choke??

She said she wanted cow milk, and then-- gasp! announced that there was a cow in the house.
A real one?
Yes!
Is is mooing?
Here a wicked twinkle enters the fey brown eyes. Yes! and POOPING!

Now, we are together at the kitchen table. She has handed me a tiny cup and assured me it is delicious. She is chewing her milk, her mouth full of grapes.
"They're kinda juicy! They are juicy grapes? Mama why are grapes are so juicy?? Because they have grape juice?"

She is leaner now, just the tiniest baby softness left in her cheeks. She is almost done with her year of being three. At the beginning of this year, she was still a nursling, still flesh of my flesh. Now she is more her own self. Brave, beautifully balanced, careening, climbing high without fear or caution. Playing with great concentration and seriousness with animal dolls and buckets of bubbles and cutting boards of homemade playdough and, naughtily, decapped markers. The "kitty stripes" on her face from the red Sharpie have faded, but the tiger stripes on her right leg and the large red rectangle on her left shin have not, in spite of long hot showers. She proudly showed her kumu hula, who laughed and tutted. "Oh, you get tattoo already??"

A moment ago I snuck off into the bathroom.
I heard an explosion of repressed giggles, and then a lobbed toy landed in front of me. Little feet scurry off.
*THUD* An empty bucket for magnetic blocks lands in the bathroom. More giggles, belly laughs. A peek around the corner.
A repeat performance, a cat, a plastic coin, flying through the bathroom door. Each time the hilarity is mounting until she can barely hold herself upright. At last a sigh, and a thoughtful announcement.
"I don't want to act like a lady anymore."

Ah, a carry over from this morning's milk party. (Not a tea party, since we were not drinking tea).
I ask her, "What do ladies do?"
She lifts a tiny pinkie and assumes a haughty expression: "Oh, Hello...!" she says, very posh for someone in jammies and two day old French braids.

Memory is so slippery, these moments feel so important. It is such a private treasure, to get to enjoy this fresh childhood. It also breaks my heart that there is no other witness. No other parent who would understand just how remarkable, how miraculous every moment with this child is.

This morning as Maile gathered her completed and tidy Japanese homework and RJ in a fancy fedora threw together a lunch bag of grapes and gold fish and pepperoni, Liko snuggled into my soft blue bathrobe. Two boxes of nearly grown chickens peeped and clamored in their boxes in the kitchen, in the orange glow of an old lamp. It's been cool, utterly October, with bright cool sunlight on the slumping brown sunflowers and the trees changing colors almost too bright and contrasting to look real. Is anything really SO yellow-tinged-orange, against the backdrop of any sky that blue? Are any real leaves so fiery in morning mist? I keep the thermostat low and mornings are cold. Liko snuggled into me, long skinny arms cool. She frowned. I asked what was wrong and she said, "I miss my daddy. I'm sad my daddy died." This is a common refrain, often piped up at unsuspecting strangers at parks or restaurants. I make my usual sympathetic noise. She continued. "I wish he can come back to life and see me how I'm so big."

This hurt. The other day I told her that her daddy's hair was "eleele"-- black-- and she was shocked. Although there are pictures of him around, she does not have a mental image of him.

 I don't know how her grief will shape her life. What is it like to never have had something? How is that different from having it, briefly, and losing it too soon, like my little 6 and 9 year old girls? How is that different from expecting something to be there, imperfect, appreciative, adoring, frustrating, hurtful, loving, terrifying, and accepting-- and then having it obliterated?

It is fall and I get melancholic in the fall. My focus narrows. My ADHD symptoms hunker in and everything feels nebulous-- maybe nebular, like an expanding, contracting, scattered-atom, nuclear fission, molecular rearranging star nursery. Ah well, times and seasons. It won't always be like this.

Liko has now stacked all of the small plastic animals in a nook of the couch, and all the soft animals-- the cats and the Little Ponies-- on the floor under the coffee table. She is reassuring them, moving them from place to place. Speaking to them in total concentration in a quiet low cadence, too quiet for me to understand. She is lost in her play-- ah, a rubber duck is carefully balanced on the arm of a chair. She is in her own world, populated with little creatures, with relationships, with needs and desires and perils. It feels so precious and fragile and I will finish my cooling cup of too bitter coffee, and not disturb her.