Summer time and the livin' is sweeter than s'mores (if it's possible to out-sweet s'mores and from some of the swaps I've seen for gourmet s'mores, people are hellbent on trying). It's actually hard to tell this today given the last throes of Juneuary and its insistent cast of GRAY, but the hot times are near and who can't taste the BBQ char on everything?
Soon there will be back to back birthday parties, grillers, and pigout potlucks. Naptime be damned! There will be family trips. And preschool breaks. Then a headlong rush into full time preschool (bye bye naps on MWF - this somewhat terrifies me)
Oh and there's an even better chance we might move... soon. Or less soon. But possibly soon.
In case you didn't know this yet. Our darling Chaya is (1) A Magical Fairy, (2) almost four and apparently going to have the most amazing and long-anticipated birthday, (3) a biiiiiiiiiiig, biiiiiiiiiig kid, (4) except when she demands that we put her back in her "little kid diapers" for the heck of it, and then says she's a baby in between her best WAAAAA WAAAA MAAAMAAA, (5) and also she's ... is there like a cutesy name describing how four year olds are nuts?
She's also sometimes a loris because she has a magical wand that makes her a loris. It's kind of amazing how all of her somewhat bizarre statements are now backed up with elaborate stories and explanations that are pretty darned coherent. I can't really argue. Oh and a princess.
Also the only way Chaya would agree to come to the table today was for me to suggest that the "snakes" she was originally afraid of might want to come in for tea and breakfast. We set the table. She set the menu for mama snake, daddy snake and baby snake (all red, the size of my leg and polka dotted). Unfortunately, it was rainy, so they never showed, but she did eventually come to the table and recriminatingly demand to know where her breakfast was (you know the breakfast she screamed she absolutely never never wanted).
I'll stick with threenager for another month and a half. Then it's back to just "vivid."
Her confidence has burst through the roof recently and it does my heart good (and occasionally my head bad, but worth it).
The intensity comes and goes without a particularly traceable pattern, but we're in a high energy phase for sure. Even Daddy is feeling a little worn thin. We may actually now have a "Chaya safe word" (Petunia).
No, a normal fourish year old child doesn't "test boundaries." I know this because I test boundaries. I push a little here and there, observe and adjust accordingly. That's testing. Chaya, runs headfirst at boundaries with a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a stick of dynamite in another screaming something incoherent about snakes and with her skirt and undies around her ankles.
It is getting more and more "interesting" trying to keep up, given her energy and my ailments, but somehow we suffice with a lot of help from daddy, Pam, Mommy's magic lasso of truth...
Good news/bad news: Plantar fasciitis is back! Subtext: my right leg is actually healing so I can walk enough to trigger foot pain.
Status Report: I'm long off antibiotics. The swelling has subsided. It seems less plausible that there are remaining shards of table in my leg. My "wound" is now a colorful symphony of sunset shades and sloughing scab. My doctor (well a doctor - it takes a village to fit me into anyone's schedule with my frequent visits) has proclaimed it "appropriately gross" and given me the green light to stop the constant compress-wash-disinfect-bandage cycle.
Currently it's a nasty white-skin-flaked atrocity with a rather gigantic and uncomfortable bruise that sketches out the general area that once held Splinter # 2 for an extra week. And it does hurt. I also get shin splints when my plantar fasciitis acts up, so it's hard to tell where one ailments ends and another begins, but my leg's occasionally an achy burning mess. But it isn't swollen to shit and I'm not constantly on alert for sepsis, so I'll take it.
Now that the impending sense of doom is wearing off, other feelings crust over the scab of "they're gonna have to cut this fucker off!" Vanity, of course, as I ponder a world in which some part of my leg is more permanently "gross" than the constant but ultimately transient bites and bruises. It's a small thing, honestly. So far, I've been sparing people glances at my unbandaged leg because it's a "little gross." Eventually I'm just gonna say "this is how it looks and you may all accept it now." I'm not sure where that line is. But damnit I have always had those pretty long legs perpetually painted in blues, blacks and the boldest cerulean irritations. It's ornamental. Ugly-pretty? Oh fuck it, here you go:
It doesn't show up super well in the photo so that's a bonus. You can't even see the friggin' mosquito bite scars from my trip back East (because of course I still have those)
In some funny way there's a sadness and satisfaction invested in that gnarly gash. You ever have an experience away from the ordinary that lights some dormant self back up, only to return back to the day-to-day and find that experience/self receding like a dream? The pain in my leg was like an anchor to this reality and self that percolated up. As it fades, another one true reality sets back in in, the lights flicker a little, and it reminds me of the presence of loneliness that permeates life through time (time which requires such fractilization to navigate). I like who I am now. I'm strong. I'm funny. I'm even practical. But I like that other self too. A lot. And the way she ebbs and flow with the people she knows. The subtle attunement and cadence and softness. We live too many lives and have too many experiences/feelings/impressions to keep them active all at once. Things must die and asleep and selves must rise and fall. But the echoes of past and future selves will never stop haunting completely. The softer more open me is in there taking a really deep breath by the riverside.
And about fifty more breaths as the hyperventilating shrieks of America's future peal from wall to wall.
Because its gonna get fun, "fun" and fun again, and can't blow all the excitement too early.
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