Perhaps I am a far better Aunt Traci than I would be a mom since laughing at her 'pretending to be dead' was a bit encouraging.
It was Christmas Day, after all. Is pretending to be dead against some sort of family-event/holiday rule?
I'm not so knowledgeable in this field. Therefore I laugh, play opossum with her, pretend not to laugh when she tickles me.
Yep, I pretend to be dead in the grass on Christmas Day outside the building where my only living blood relatives eat gumbo.
And this makes her feel closer to me.
Makes her attach onto me as if she were part of my body, closer to me than my own body.
She asks me to sit next to her at the dinner table. I sit with her and her sister. They copy my speed of eating.
When my spoon of gumbo rises, so does theirs.
One likes sausage, one likes chicken; unlike their parents, I tell them it's okay to trade as long as they eat what they get.
Which also makes her feel closer to me.
This is a self-portrait of how I spent a better part of the day:
You get tired very quickly when you suddenly add a fourth of your body weight onto your calf or back.
(Or when you play airplane/boat/helicopter/four-wheeler, which I do... a lot... at family functions with kids.)
Which means I also encourage falling/rolling down hills/general spills into the grass:
I post these tonight not purely because I processed them today but because I looked at them at my desk tonight and was struck by the beauty of becoming attached and close to another heart-beating, warm being.
Easy to see in such simple photos.
How much we love, how much we inspire love. How much we attach with a fervent speed, almost arbitrarily.
(I won't go into this tonight. Please, goodness, let me resist writing about this tonight.)
Silly, isn't it, to spend the last minutes of my night -- the official morning of my birthday -- thinking of love and touch in this way?
To spend it resisting the idea of love as anything less than splendor?
(I didn't think so either.)
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