Dear Reese,
Watching MorMor and Cappi with you is an up-close case study on how good of parents they are and have always been. We really hit the jackpot, darling. I’ve known this for a long while. And you will come to know it fully with time. Maybe you already know by the way your whole face lights up when you see them. You crawl over them on the floor. To them while they stand at the kitchen sink. Cappi dances with you around the dining room and MorMor plays with you and woodland puppets on the sunroom floor.
This is the season where we spend weekends with them — today: brunch at Sip, your first visit to my office (to get my computer cord I left there before our Snow Day this week), and a shopping trip at Piggly Wiggly. In the afternoon we walk you in the Jeep wagon and lay you down flat when your eyes get heavy so you can nap.
You’re feeling better today. You still spent half the night in my bed last night but your fever is gone and you were only occasionally leaky with snop instead of the constant drip yesterday. We keep at the Tyleonal though — if not to help the cold to help with the teething. You chew on the metal table number or my keys during our brunch.
You do something funny before we pack up for home this evening and start scooting around on your butt. Sitting up, launching yourself forward to move around the carpet (like you don’t already know how to crawl). I postulate that you are trying to launch yourself to standing. MorMor says it looks like you’re going to do a header (and you may yet) and puts her hands up to help you jump to standing. Once you figure out your balance you’ll be off to the races.
In part 11 of our bathtime story tonight, we return to the Beaver Dam where you’ve just landed yourself in prison after purposefully angering the forces of the dam itself. Even though this was your plan, your heart races as you find yourself alone with no apparent exits deep in the center of the dam. You take a deep breath and listen.
Water over logs. The rustling of movement far away . . . or very close. And maybe it’s your imagination but you swear you hear the flap of the black swan’s wing over the pond surface. Then, softly, croak.
You call out for The Great Bullfrog.
“Little one?” you hear her voice. She must be near but you can’t see her. “What are you doing here?”
“I have come to rescue you,” you tell her. “I have completed your trials and I need your gift to help my family.”
The Great Bullfrog is quiet for a moment. “That doesn’t matter now. I do not have the power to bestow any gift with the black swan’s return. And no one can escape the Beaver Dam’s imprisonment.”
“The black swan did,“ you counter. “So it can be done. I don’t know how he did it, but I have my own way to set us free.”
You shrug off your adventurer’s pack and pull out a simple trowel. Your MorMor gave it to you to help her in the garden.
[In reality, you have grabbed a shovel from the beach toys turned bath toys nearby, as good as inspiration as any.]
You’ve observed something since visiting this pond kingdom — you are different than most beings here. And your MorMor told you that this trowel will help you replant, move soil, dig holes for new growth. This is no garden, but the trowel carries magic from your kingdom that has never been seen here before.
You begin to dig, jamming the trowel into the sticks beneath you. the crack and brake. “What are you doing?” The Great Bullfrog asks with a low croak but you ignore him as the very dam starts to shudder. The trowel lets off sparks as you wedge it now against the side of the prison. A log splits. Again and again, you put your strength into it until the wall breaks and you see her: The Great Bullfrog looking at you with wide-eyed amazement.
Before you can say anything, the dam violently shakes again and keeps shaking. “You’ve disrupted the magic of this place,” The Great Bullfrog says. “Quickly, we must flee before the dam collapses!”
Love,
Mama