It's 9:45am, Tuesday morning, and the windows are closed this morning since the storms have left the air too humid.
Kiddo's fishy-smelling diapers are rinsing for the second time downstairs in the washer (thanks DESITIN: FUCK YOU. Who puts COD LIVER OIL in their diaper cream? A better question: who DOESN'T READ THE LABELS before using an ointment on their Kiddo?), and she is handing me her Hawaiian Lady and her Traveling Lady alternately, then shoving them back in my hands when I try to give them to her.
The coffeemaker is beeping as I try to squeeze two cups of coffee out of the childsize handful of beans we have left, and the coffee will be too watery to drink although I don't know it yet.
I'm sitting on the couch in a yoga tank and yoga pants, not doing yoga and not intending to do yoga, reading from a collection of Joan Didion essays, and I start crying in a very Joan-Didion-1967 way when I finish "On Going Home" because she brings her daughter "home" (which is to say, the place where her family lives in central California) for her daughter's first birthday, and Joan "would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and can promise her nothing like that."
I pick Kiddo up in a moment of self-pity and put her on my lap and tell her I want to give her home, but she shoves "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" in my face and announces "BNEE! BNEE!" while pointing at Peter and squirms out of my grip, because you cannot miss home if you do not know what it is like to be without it.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
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1 comment:
Home is thing that changes when you need it to. It must be like the summers of your childhood, where young minds filter until you have an unending stretch of trips to the swimming pool and dusty baseball pants pierced with sunshine and slathered in sunscreen. It's moving that changes those things, and that solidifies their importance in our autobiographies as it makes them largely changeproof. And that's when you get it.
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