anna in the sun

the visit

I had to pick up my W2, so I stuck Anna in the carrier and walked down 7th Ave to school. She rests her head on my chest and looks up. I imagine what she sees over my shoulder: a rough triangle of sky intermittently laced with branches. The irregular edges of roofs. Windows, the things in windows. The flock of swallows (are they swallows?) that swoop and bank and turn as one, black and then white as they circle around. She probably sees chimneys. She probably sees the way light catches on smooth surfaces. And she probably doesn't know that's light reflected, it probably looks like an object in itself, a spangle on the pizza place door, a bright slice on the blue hump of the mailbox. She looks to me astounded.

We picked up the W2, and then we visited some kids I know. "These are called kids," I whispered in Anna's ear as they touched her feet and squealed. "You are one of them." She looked serious. The kids with their bright lively faces, looking inches taller than when I saw them last in November, wanted to say things to me about their own babyhoods. The stories they tell about themselves sound different to me now that I am a mama. They grow tall with pride as they announce simple things: "My hair was red when I was born. Red!" or "when I was a baby I was so fat." Or, with a mystified look, "we have a new baby at my house too!"

My girl will get big and carry a little backpack and have opinions and go to school and tell her teacher stories about when she was little, when she was a baby, how she loved to look at the radiator most of all.

one from the vault, since sleep is ever on my mind . . .

Rip

By the time he found the tree his head
was full of honey. Pale sweet-grass
curved over hummocks of black earth -
and under that: the busy lives of insects,
sediment, bedrock, watershed, core.
He thought forward no further than sleep.
As he dropped to his knees, spring dirt
caught him, arms out-flung, cheek
pressed to needle-worked grass.
The sleep was long, though it felt quick
as a blown lantern: the cooling wick, spark
alone in the kitchen a moment, then gone.
He dreamed houses rose and fell like seasons
of crop against sun, felt the scythe’s
momentary nick at the ankles.
He dreamed rivers edged ever closer
to where rivers wished to be. He dreamed
of songbirds plated in sheets of tin.
And then he woke, naked but for his boot nails
and belt buckle: a bracken-haired man
in a thicket (shadows pulled slim
on the hill, bees at the fallen pears.)
He shook loose his dirt blanket.
He started home.

these feet were made for walking . . .

(but not just yet.)

circus

We went to the circus yesterday. Calder’s, that is, at the Whitney. 6 new mamas and our 6 busy infants, stuffed into the 6 train uptown. We were like a baby parade, ladies with babies zipped inside coats, resplendent in fuzzy suits with ears on the hoods and knitted bonnets that tie below the chin. Or double chin as the case may be. It was a whirlwind of gear and feeding – our first stop was the museum café where we took up three tables and all sunk back into the folding chairs to feed the hungry ones, who gulped and slurped and smacked their lips as they would have at home, oblivious to their cultured surroundings.

But the Circus, that was something else again. The elevator opens onto a wall of wire portraits, Jimmy Durante and Josephine Baker. Line made three dimensional, you could see inside their heads. They swayed gently and made themselves again in shadow against the wall. Anna was captivated. She grinned and talked to them like she grins and talks to things she loves at home – her favorite radiator and lamp post, her beloved bookshelf and fridge. We walked and she looked – the sweet lumpy-hipped dancer, the three graces with arms akimbo, the rumple-trunked elephant. Her eyebrows gathered together in concentration. Every so often she’d call to what she saw. We walked the length of Romulus and Remus suckling on their lean wire mama wolf. The nipples looked like they were made of wooden drawer-pulls. We saw the splayed dangling toes of the dancer lady and the tiny pig swinging inside the happy sow.

When it was time to go, it was Time to Go. Some of us waited in the lobby while others of us teamed up on an amazingly explosive poop in the second floor bathroom where the changing table was chin-high. The lobby babies all leaned back in their slings, staring at the honeycomb of lights on the ceiling, black, white, black, white. We ladies, tired, looked up happily too.

snow

The tight rectangles of the block’s back yards fill up, little white serving-dishes of snow. Trees catch it. Even the slim surfaces of chain-link hexagons catch it.

The baby’s sleeping again. She had her shots this morning. Yelled less than I thought she would, just looked astounded, and made two fat tears. Fell asleep fast when we got home, after walking down 7th Avenue inside my coat. Her view: a triangle of sky with snow inside. Every so often a flake would land on her face and melt, leaving a tiny water dome. She looked around intently and made no sound.

It’s taken me 10 years to love snow in the city. It used to just make me homesick for Minnesota fields. Corn stubble poking though drifts in parallel rows, crows on the wire with heads tucked under sleek black wings. A length of pasture to walk beside, long ditches extravagantly drifted. The sound of nothing, standing still between white sky and white ground.

I am raising a city baby. Will she be scared of the quiet, when we go visiting? I want to give her the smell of alfalfa and the moist breath of cows and the quiet of falling snow falling on snow already fallen.

hat story