November 24, 2009

You are learning how to laugh. You open your mouth wide into a smile and then make sounds through your wide open mouth, your gums a thin white-pink ridge.

Yesterday, while your father met with Kyle at the Cage, I walked you through the halls of St. Olaf. In your yellow sleeper, back curled against my chest, tiny fist inside your mouth, you watched and watched and watched. You liked especially a series of paintings: splatters of bright color with black telephone poles painted across the top.

For dinner, your father made steaks in the cast iron skillet. When I tried to make mashed potatoes I found that the milk had soured; it came out of the gallon jug in chugs of lumpy curdled yuckiness. "Huh," said your father, "maybe that's why my breakfast cereal tasted odd this morning."

Nothing seems to stay good for long in our refrigerator these days. Mostly, we have a large selection of condiments: maple syrup, salad olives, mango chutney, bottles of two-year-old salad dressing, steak sauce, boysenberry jam, mayo, yellow mustard, dijon mustard, ketchup, relish, pickles, a jar of unopened tahini sauce, soy sauce, sour cream, etc. Also featured, in various states of disrepair: whole wheat tortillas, chicken noodle soup with dime sized growths of gray mold floating on the surface, wilted cilantro, yogurt, and deli slices of turkey.

I feel in a state of disrepair too. The gray weather has returned, no amount of sleep ever leaves me feeling fully rested, and Jon's daughter is still dead. Yesterday, driving back from the grocery store with pumpkin beer and canned corn and butter and corn meal, I listened to Kent Gustufson's "Stolen Shack" CD. He has a haunting version of "Green Pastures" that made me weep as I stared at red turn signals blinking in the mist and rain:

Going up home to live in green pastures
Where we shall live and die never more
Even The Lord will be in that number
When we shall reach that Heavenly Shore

Sweet Thisbe, thank you for keeping me here, alive and present. There is no avoiding joy when you smile. I am helpless against it. And now your laugh. And your small sleeper suits, mostly in various shades of pink and lavender, little collars and animal faces stitched onto the feet (bunny ears or ladybug anntenae), all folded up by the changing table awaiting your warm form. You love to be naked on your changing table. Your nipples are the exact same color as your chest. You bat the cold air with your arms, you raise your legs as if trying to touch your toes to the ceiling, your body fills with living--and my love for you is complete and profound.