alabama is at her most beautiful in the last throes of spring. memorial day weekend definately qualifies as late spring, i think. (hard to believe that summer is still a bare month away...seems like it was just christmas...) and even though the lovely state is in the middle of a drought, and the wildfires in georgia made going outside smell like a campfire all day, every day, alabama was nonetheless lovely. it's hard not to be happy when you're by the pool, with a high blue sky above you and family around you. granted, it's easy to be nostalgic, and maybe have to sneak off to a little corner to catch you breath and say a little prayer and cry a tiny tear, because family has a way of making your heart hurt, in a good way, because you love them and they love you, and even though you want things to stay the same, you know they change with every single heartbeat. that's beautiful and awful, all at the same time.
for example--my wee little cousins (ella is 4 weeks, austin is 3 years) grow so fast, you can almost hear them growing in their sleep. austin is in the late stages of potty training, and ella is trying to learn how to a)be a real person outside the womb, and b) set up a sleep cycle that makes some kind of sense to everyone. they are both doing very well with their tasks. granted, both of them have lungs that will hold a lot of air, and vocal chords that allow them to reach soaring heights at decibel levels that seem to defy the laws of nature...but they sure get their points across.
it's funny what you notice about the difference between boys and girls when they are small--and i don't mean anatomical differences, either. with austin, who is very much a little boy into little boy things (his mother reports that for the last two weeks, he's been so preoccupied with building his thomas the tank engine tracks that he's totally lost interest in playing with his neighborhood pals), playing is the name of the game. he's on the go. he will be on the go from here on out. he's very goal oriented--stories are for nap-time and potty-time, they are not part of play time. play time needs to be outside or on the floor, surrounded by things with parts he can't swallow. it's good stuff. he's very busy. i've had the same experience with the World's Greatest Nephew. he's very into playing, and his play is deadly serious to him. he's not much into sitting and listening. oh sure, they will hear the highlights of stories, and have stories of their own--about how no man with a drop of graves blood in his veins can get out of this world without a monumental scar on his chin, and how that scar, in some bizarre way, symbolizes your role as a man in the family, whether you can remember how you got it or not...
now i realize good and well that ella is only a month old, but that girl, and whatever girls come along after her, will be the keeper of the stories. girls have the time to sit and hear the story. oh sure, they play, but they play differently. ella will know the stories that grandma jane told anna and mia, and the stories granny told to anna, mia, and me. ella will know stories that nanny told granny, that momee told nanny, that mere told momee. she will hear stories about crazy aunt rosie, about aunt bunch, about new orleans, and belle chase, and how nanny and fred's best friends were the guilliardo's, and how they used to boil 200 pounds of crawfish in an afternoon, just to feed the families. and we will tell her our own stories, as well. and she, and all the other little girls will keep them, until their are new little girls to tell old stories to.
sure, she smells like sleep and promises. and she has the whole world in front of her, tiny chances and giant leaps that wait before her, like the angles of some higher heaven, waiting to catch her and keep her as she begins her own journey. she is part of my story. i am part of hers. mil besos--rmg
i snapped this picture in the lady's room at ben's chili bowl. it's kind of stunning, i think. it's totally going in the book. i just hope i'm up to the task of writing something worthy of sitting next to this question. i keep going back to it, knowing that at some point, i'll know what to say. in the mean time, it's been a good catalyst for late-night thought. and thank God ben's decided to paint their bathrooms with blackboard paint--this was chalked high up on the wall, by the air duct.
