-image via Google
“That’s you, that’s me, and that’s Mama,” I hear my 9-year-old’s gentle voice, the voice she puts on for her little sister, like a cooing, soothing voice an adult might use romantically, as I look over and see her pointing at a drawing she’d made earlier, both she and her sister lying on their fronts, so close to each other their wild hairs merge. The paper, filled with lines and curves that made up a picture of three people standing in front of a house, lay in front of them, crumpled slightly near the edges, but otherwise intact.
The rain is falling heavily outside. It’s always raining nowadays. In the late evenings, when it is near bed time like this, and it rains, the lightning and thunder scare us, so we stay together, so we can stay safe, and the girls and I play with the wood puzzle I got at the second-hand store, the base of which to hold the cut-out shapes are already drawn on with swirly handwritten notes of “I love wood puzzles” and “wood puzzles are the best” in red and black ink. Someone will always ask, sheepishly, if the person whom we had bought it from had even liked doing the wood puzzle, at every start of the game, and we’d laugh, all three of us, even the baby, because by now she has gotten the joke.
The puzzle now lay across the mattress, the green, red, blue, purple, yellow, black and white Tetris shapes strewn all over in defeat. I let them be and listen on:
“See how the ground is all wobbly like that? That’s because the house was built on soft sand,” my daughter continues. Her sister babbles something incoherent, apparently acknowledging the sand, and the older one says, “that’s right, like the sand at the beach. So cleveeeeer!” She expands her compliment, mimicking me because that’s what I always do, and I smile, and roll my eyes at her.
“The walls are made of straw, and when the wind blows, the straw bends, like this -” and she proceeds to stand up and does a lone Mexican wave. The baby laughs, as if it was the best joke ever told, even better than the “I love wood puzzles” joke.
“The roof is the best part though, it is invisible!” This she says with an ominously excitable tone, as if she was a magician abracadabra-ing. The baby looks up with wonder in her eyes, no doubt imagining white pigeons suddenly appearing out of her sister’s arm-spread, wings flapping and free forming into the open air. She ends her presentation matter-of-factly with: “it lets the sun in, the wind, the rain, the lightning and the thunder, EVERYTHING!”
I join them now, on the mattress, stained yellow with the baby’s sweat from her afternoon nap earlier and look at the drawing carefully so I can make a viable comment.
“Why are our smiles so weird?” I say.
“Those aren’t smiles! Silly Mama,” she chuckles. “Those are Addams Family faces. Because we’re not alive, but we’re not dead either.”
Lightning flashed inside our dark room just then, and the children make a whimpering sound in unison like little rabbits not fast enough to outrun their predator, and I grabbed them both and hold them in my arms, looking down at that piece of paper that is crumpled slightly on the edges, but otherwise intact, waiting for the storm to pass.
The astuteness of children cuts so deep in our hearts sometimes it’s as if they know more than even we do... beautiful as always Lisha... ♥️