Everyone into the pool! Hot thick air…swirling and twirling around the edges of the pool…and everyone can’t wait to get in, jump in, dive in! Simmering heated broth on this blistering June afternoon…one potato, two potatoes, three potatoes…hmmm. Children in the sunshine soup…must be eating a lot of potatoes out there…plop! No hitter, no hitter, no hitter…swing!

Flop! Blurp! Slop…sloppy, slippery, ploppery…one chunk, two chunks, three chunks…four. Childhood obesity right in front of my weary eyes…every imaginable ethnicity and demographic…all wet and chubby bubby and rolling all around…swimming all around in the cooking pool water…all the statistics, all the news charts, all the warnings…and everyone can’t wait to get into the pool…into the water…into the potato salad, the hot dogs, the chips…corn syrup for everyone, my friends!

And everyone can’t wait to dive in…sludgy, budgy, pudgy…summer sugar babies…swimming around, floating around, rolling around in the frothy cooling broth. Bubbling up from the bottom…troubling up from the bottom…and everyone into the pool!

To remember the specific detail, the forgotten temperament, the smaller person, the subtle color…that was everything. Drowning in the bigger picture, the never ending noise…the busy world which would not cease talking and posting. It was time for the single petal, the nuanced emotion of a child’s face, vanished in a split second.

To miss these details, in the end meant missing absolutely everything important.

She was desperate to paint, to breathe, to touch the lost second, the unheard words…the skin’s touch…the truth.

In the waning hours of summer and in the newness and damp of autumn, we built a house. We planted a tree. The foundation settled and we painted walls. The front yard wound around grassy clumps, sprouting fresh, surprised weeds and we walked around and around together deciding where lilacs and hydrangeas and trees might settle.

Then…it was a long, deathful winter; desolate and grey and flat with each new morning dawning early and cold. Waking with hot coffee, a book or two and the resolve to see the sunrise, I pursued nothing with any interest. My mind thinned.

And then in April, I looked up and noticed a bird chirping wildly outside my home. He sang out brilliantly and I rose up and I looked for this bird, this feathered fluttering ball perched outside on the thinnest reed, a mere willow wisped branch of the tree we planted when we built the house.

Nestled on the barest edge of eternity, cocking his head on a greening limb, every chirp and warble wiggled the leaves and shook the infant tree as it struggled to sustain the bird’s chubby plump enthusiasm.

The branch stretched, just thick enough to hold him; barely. He sang his heart out as I peeked around the curtain. In time I returned to my book and listened for a while longer. He vanished around 6:20am.

What kept me from him so long as I sat in thin places? I nestled at length in clouds, waiting for a thicker branch to grow; hoping for a thicker branch to grow.

Turns out…the principal was single handedly trying to save the world. Everyone else in the room however, was attempting one of two things; make it to the end of June…and/or hang on until retirement. The bitter end was in sight.

She pulled out a bull horn.

It was going to be a long staff meeting…

I leaned through the open car door window and said to Lolly who was grinning and waving madly from her sticky car seat, “Girl, we are in the middle of a pandemic! What do you think about that?’

She leaned back and screechy laughed, pointed at me and continued to suck on her draggling, single French fry.

It’s good to be 15 months old.