A letter that Hannah wrote recently:
Dear Queen Elisbeth,
I was wondering if I could send thee majesty some clothing.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Her Majesty’s clothing choices, of course, but Hannah loves to design gowns. Apparently she’s ready to share.
And why not?
So here I am in Fort Worth, Texas, Gateway to the West, surrounded by public radio fundraisers and pictures of steers. I come back to my hotel room to do some work and my cell phone rings. It’s Jane. “We need to talk,” she says.
“What’s wrong?” I immediately feel my body lurch into the red zone.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “It’s just . . . we have a cat situation.”
A cat situation? Did one of our cats get sick? Get lost? Kill a raccoon?
The next voice I hear is Hannah’s.
“Hi, Mama,” she says. “We’re at the Humane Society.”
Oh, good lord. I go away to Texas where I cannot nix the idea and they run off to the Humane Society.
“There’s the cutest kitten here and his name is Moe,” she continues.
No, I think, his name is Ours.
“Put Mommy back on the phone,” I say.
I hear Jane’s voice.
“What, exactly, were you thinking?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We just kind of ended up here and he really is adorable.”
Jane is barely capable of driving by the Humane Society without a cat springing into the back seat of the car. As Jane tells it, she took Hannah to lunch in our old neighborhood and, on the way, they drove by the road that leads to the Humane Society. Apparently, the magnetic pull was too much.
“He’s black and white and has a little star above his nose,” Jane says. “But I wanted to talk to you first,” she adds. Which, honestly, is very sweet, although the deed is so, so done.
Oddly, I’m not upset, although it would not be my first choice to live with three cats. My first choice would have been the puppy. That we do not have. But there are two girls in my life who are sappy for cats and they’re standing in the Humane Society in Minnesota holding fluffy little Moe while I’m standing in a hotel room in Texas. Moe might as well move in and make his bed on my pillow.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“He really is cute,” Jane says.
Hannah gets back on the phone.
“And there’s this other little kitty named Burt, and he’s Moe’s brother, and do you want to hear him mew?” I hear a sound that is disturbingly like a dog toy being squeezed.
“Put Mommy back on the phone, Hannah!”
“Burt???????”
This may have been part of the wily plan, but when I find out that Burt is not, in fact, part of the adoption package, I feel as though I have dodged a furball. Suddenly having three cats will not be bad at all because, hey, it’s not four. Lucky me.
There are a lot of things to say about living with a seven-year-old, and here’s one: playing Hangman is a lot harder than you ever thought. Why? Because she’s still learning to spell. So, I lose again and again on words like:
LOOME (what you weave on)
CONTINU (something that keeps going)
and my personal favorite,
CARISMAS TREE (something you might decorate in December).
It brings Hannah no end of joy to draw all of the little body parts of the poor hangman, right down to the eyes, hair and incongruous smile. She tops it off by writing on the side, WINNER HANNAH.
Loser, Mama.
Each year, Hannah plans for her birthday almost as long as Jane and I did. We spent nine months on it (well, OK, plus ten years). This year, Hannah has spent six months cooking up plans for the big day, March 19, when she will turn Seven.
This is apparently a monumental event, this sevenness. She has started shunning all things “babyish,” even when that includes the children’s room at the library. She flinched visibly when I took her to the Central Library in downtown St. Paul and she was forced to walk past the books displayed in the entry about Miss Bindergarten getting ready for kindergarten. Afterward, we went out to dinner at one of our favorite neighborhood spots, the St. Clair Broiler. They know us there. Rather well, in fact. The server reached for some crayons and a children’s menu – a paper placemat listing the 6 kid-friendly food choices, surrounded by little games and a picture of a baby dinosaur that Hannah has colored 40 or 50 times. Hannah raised her hand in a cool brush-off. “No, thank you,” she said and walked on by. She’s big time now. She’s almost seven.
Available in bookstores now.
Readings and events.