Things I Love About You

I drop you off at school in the morning and linger a moment in the car, watching.  Your light blue backpack slides off your shoulders and hangs on your elbows.  You shrug it back up.  Your navy blue yoga pants rumple on top of your snow boots.  Your hair is pulled back in a messy pony tail.  Your bangs, which you insisted on cutting and re-cutting yourself, are held by barrettes clipped perpendicular to your forehead.  You walk inside.  You walk away from me.

* *

You are catching a cold.  You count your sneezes all day long.  “Sixteen,” you say at dinner.

* *

We play games at bedtime before you fall into sleep.  One of your favorites is “Would you rather?”  Would you rather . . . be a peanut or a walnut?  Would you rather be a rock or a tree?  Would you rather be a bird or a song?

* *

You are obsessed with birth.  In pre-school, you announced that you wanted to be a baby doctor, you wanted to help babies get born.  I walk down to the basement one evening after dinner and find you and Jane watching something on YouTube.  “What are you doing?” I ask.  You look at me with a huge grin.  “We’re watching a giraffe give birth,” you say.

* *

Another game.  The object is to make up the longest, most winding and wandering sentence you can imagine.  We call it Melville.

* *

You love the planets.  Jupiter is your favorite.  You like to name its largest and most famous moons.  “Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Io,” I hear you recite.

“I’m getting tired of being cold, Hannah,” I say one day.  Snow piles outside our windows and the temperature seems stuck at ten below.

“Good thing we don’t live on Pluto,” you respond.

* *

You adore weddings.  You fill notebook after notebook with your wedding gown designs:  sleek, ruffled, Victorian, modern.  You have planned a wedding for Jane and me, down to the shoes we will wear and the food we will eat at the reception.  You will be the bridesmaid, of course, and you have that dress designed as well.  From time to time, you ask if we will get married as soon as the government says it’s OK.  As though to remind me.  As though to promise yourself that it will happen, it will.

* *

You love history.  You can easily spend an hour in an antiques store.  You save your money to buy an antique typewriter.  You are enthralled by your grandpa’s genealogy work.  But you are also seven and have a seven-year-old’s sense of humor.  “Spell ICUP,” you and your friends say to each other.  “I-C-U-P.”  Endless giggles.

* *

One morning before school, you wake unusually early.  You call me in to cuddle with you.  Jane is getting ready for work, in her long blue bathrobe, her wet hair wrapped in a towel.  You call her in.  “Come snuggle with us,” you say.  She lies down on the other side of you.  “Where would we be without family?” you say.