Child Love
Moving slow like a wave the days with my daughter unfurl in a languid and sleepy, sleep-deprived dream. Always, there are dishes to wash, spilling out over the sink across the counter, and onto the floor, as I attempt to make everything for us from scratch, even the refried beans, I buy dry, then soak, then simmer in an enormous skillet, then attempt to mash, and then to freeze. Why do I do this, when they cost a mere 89 cents a can, I wonder, as I take the vegetable matter left in the juicer and attempt to pulverize it with my inadequate appliances, to form into patties, to wrap in parchment, to place in a large container, snug, together, tucked in the over-full freezer so I can fry the homemade vegetable patties for our dinners another day. When I do, they taste so awful that we cannot eat them, but I cannot seem to throw them out.
Wherever I may be, she is there and busily exploring, and so when I am in the kitchen, tall like a tree, at the sink out of reach or stove so high, I turn to find each lid and bowl of the tupperware has been removed from the large bottom drawer within which she now sits, happy and chattering. The baking supplies in the expansive kitchen of this old historic house are relocated from the next higher drawer above the storage containers after I return from wiping the avocado smeared on the high chair around the corner to find her covered in white, swimming through flour on her chubby tummy across the kitchen tiles.
Across the tiles and over the rugs she scoots on her bottom, pulling her wobbly self upward to place a small hand upon my knee, looking up into my face with expectant wonder, as I sit with my books and my tea on the end of the sofa that is propped up with a brick in place of the missing leg, for to sit at the other end is to cause just enough displacement for the brick to slip slowly, centimeter by centimeter, out of place, unnoticed until the time I go to sit and discover myself on the floor.
On the floor is where she loves me to be, and where she often lies upon the shining old wood, her back flat and long, legs too, long and crossed at the ankle, her torso the stem her limbs the leaves her lovely blond head the pistol of the beautiful wildflower she becomes, her dozens of colorful books strewn about, the petals, lightly moving, her curiosity a gentle, constant breeze.
She swings in the swing upon the porch looking out at the cosmos and cleome, lightly moving in the gentle breeze, planted next to the sidewalk leading to our door. While I dug the grass and pulled the roots to clear the plot for the garden in the earlier spring, she just near, busily plucking the tiniest little flowers hiding between the blades, and sprinkling her findings upon my bent head. Busy in my task and mind, the gentleman who rocks on his porch across the road made the smallest sound, causing me to look up from the soil to see she had crawled too close to the curb. I nod a thank you to him and he nods in return, never a word spoken between us, and yet I remember his kindness over these long years.
She falls asleep nicely in her little crib only to awaken in the night and I gather her quickly before I fully awaken, before she is unsettled too long, back to my bed with me, where we both prefer to be, together, knowing each is there. The bed is simply a mattress upon the floor, and in the morning I awake to the lightest touch of chubby fingers upon my eyelid as she so gently pries my eye open and I fall endlessly into a spiraling sapphire sea as she leans her sweet belly against my arm tucked under my head, and, as she presses her eye to mine, holding my face in her soft warm hands, I languidly drown in the slow crest of a simple dawning that she is Love, she is Beauty, she is Divine.
© Lisa Thorne 2023.
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