I find it remarkable that Hannah has made it to second grade and is still so naive about cussing.  This is the result of sending her to a school where language is taken seriously.  Never once, in two years of dropping her off and picking her up at school, have I heard a kid swear or — more important to me — call someone gay or fag.

“Do you, now?” I say.

“Yup,” she says with satisfaction.  I wait.

“HELena,” she says.  ”HELen.  DAMage.  And ASphalt.”

Ooh, she’s bad.  That’s my girl.

I am reading Crossing the Barriers, the autobiography of Allan Spear.  On the cover, he is pictured addressing a crowd of people.

“He was a legislator in Minnesota,” I say.  “He helped to make rules for our state and he was the president of the Minnesota Senate for a long time.  He was one of the first legislators in the country to tell people he was gay.  He worked hard for equality for gay people.”

“Did someone kill him?” she asks.

* *

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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.