The world is burning down and everyone is dying, and it's also summer and the kiddo is back home, and life is made of honestly probably excessive handwashing and rage over the neighbors being, like, alive, at a distance that's probably safe but that's just too close for a day that's already included getting the mail and deciding if the grocery store would be too crowded and reading about how many tens of thousands of people have died and wondering if being alive really matters all that much in the scheme of things and feeling ungrateful for being so wrecked when I'm not even sick, I have a home and food and I don't even go out, smashed up with moments like this:
The kiddo is nestled in my lap playing Candy Crush as we sit on the shady back porch steps, because, she says, my lap is softer than the wooden floorboards, while I watch a black and orange butterfly drink nectar from the chest-high flowers along the fence, long, narrow dusty green leaves on yellow stems, and masses of tiny pink flower nubs collected into little oval clumps, like saucers missing their teacups. The kiddo is videotaping the bees in the yard, and when I watch the video later I see what I missed in real life as I watched her taping, I thought, a random clump of grass, she spots a tiny white butterfly and quietly talks to herself as she walks up to it, "a butterfly!", "I'm walking slow and steady", "I'm getting so close!" and then later she's giggling because we're in the narrow sideyard and all she can see is my butt, "maybe I should be in front", and I'm realizing right now, right as I'm typing this, that the whole world must be butts to her. I escape the the sunny front porch because they are melting down old candles and the scent is making it hard for me to breathe, and I look down at the sheltered nook where the heat pump drops its condensation, a little white plastic snake dripping into the brown soil, and the square of earth has filled up queen anne's lace, and a ladybug is perched on one white flower, like a drop of blood, and I call out to the kiddo, because ladybugs are the one bug she's not afraid of, she says, and we marvel at it together, we've never seen one with no spots before.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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