(no subject)

[rivka]

This evening I found myself wandering my neighborhood in the dark, carrying a little girl dressed only in a T-shirt and a pair of pink underpants with little zebras on them. We were looking for the moon. Her head rested slackly on my shoulder, and her skin against my bare arms was dry and burning hot.

"Where is the moon?" she asked me fretfully. "Is it still sleeping?"

Michael went on a reconnaissance mission to see if the moon might be visible from another street. I carried Alex back to our front steps and sat down, cradling her in my arms. We were mostly hidden by the thicket of morning glories climbing up the railing. We waited for Michael to come back and tell us whether he'd found the moon. We waited for the Advil to kick in and bring her fever down.

She'd come down with it yesterday. All day long, I'd felt as though my parenting skills had suddenly fallen through the cellar floor. Alex, it seemed, could do little more than demand things and weep. When her shirt rode up and I touched her burning back, everything became clear. A dose of Tylenol later, my parenting skills had returned.

She was perkier this morning, as they tend to be - although still prone to suddenly lying down on the floor and asking to go to sleep. I optimistically told Michael to call me if he thought I'd need to take tomorrow off. By 11am, he called to tell me that her temperature was climbing.

I came home at 5:00. When I opened the door, I saw Alex sprawled sleeping on the living room floor, Michael at her side. Her skin was the unhealthy, dirty-pale color of a mushroom. Michael told me that she'd fought sleep all day until she succumbed just before I came home. Bill came by, expecting our biweekly dinner, and after a short anxious conference took himself away again. Alex cried out, fell back asleep, cried out again, woke up. Asked to be carried up to her crib.

Woke up again a little while later, asking for the potty and getting a temperature-taking (which she protested bitterly) and another sweet sticky dose of Advil. Slept for perhaps another fifteen minutes. Woke. "Mommy, I'm awake, I'm awake! I want to go look for the moon."

So that's how we came to be wandering there in the night, half-dressed, on a fruitless search for a moon that hadn't quite managed to crest the surrounding buildings.

"Can we go inside?" Alex asked. "Because I'm a little hot."

We went inside, drank some juice, did some puzzles. Her skin cooled, and some of her energy returned. I eased her into her rocket ship pajamas. Michael slipped outside again, and came back to report that the moon had been sighted - two blocks away, on Eager Street. He scooped Alex up and we walked up the street together.

There it was, hanging enormous and plump and golden in the violet night sky. As gorgeous a harvest moon as a tired, sick little girl could possibly ask for.

Her skin, when I laid my hand against it, was cool. She nestled into Michael's arms and sighed happily. "I really love the moon."

Comments

[gtrout.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the moon loves her, too.