Lovelihood

Today, on the countdown of events leading up to The Boy's first day of real school, we met at his new school's playground with other incoming Kindergarteners in a sort of mass-organized playdate hell. Being social comes naturally to noone in this family, except for little Bear who will force her grinning cheeks into the face of every stranger glancing in her direction. But we weathered it well, absorbing new faces and names, finding new allies with whom to poke at bugs and commiserate on the rate of child care.

I know I've mentioned it before, but I've got no aptitude for horticulture. I put things in the dirt. They look pretty for the month that I care enough to water and maintain them. Then they become a sick, brown, tangled mess. On the other hand, I love examining Seattle's many p-patches, even through the more unruly plots with overgrown chard and feral artichokes. Flowers, some wild, some exotic, go unharvested, seemingly seeded just for the sake of growing something in a public spot, nestled between the hip dot-com corridor and the Interstate.

The Boy came home with a sweet thank you card today, payout from that last birthday party he attended. We usually rely on kid-scrawled lettering to achieve that sought-after pre-school chic. This way works, too.

I'm positive that things used to get made, by me even, without the warm glow of technology at my side. But it's been a while.

Gazing out the window one gray morning, The Boy, hunting out cloud shapes, identified one swiftly-passing specimen as Russia. That's how it usually goes for Seattle's cloud-gazers, our amorphous nimbi generally spanning all visible overhead space, more resembling continental land formations than fluffy little fauna. The clouds overhead today are more suitable material for stream-of-consciousness daydreaming.

Took a little trip to the Downs today, mostly to watch weiner dogs hustle their ridiculous little bodies down the straightaway — an annual event designed to attract families to the track (spoiler: it worked) — but also to see some horsies up close. Bear, a lifelong city-girl unaccustomed to seeing large animals up close, doesn't care if it's a thoroughbred or one of the horses with neon bandages tasked with escorting the racers to and from the track. But the escort horses do take a more leisurely course, closer to the spectator area, so there is that. Having forgot, of course, to bring the camera, I made do with the camera phone and one of the many now-passé Instagram filters.

What I imagine Picasso's freebie cake watercolor palette would look like, taken out, one Friday summer evening, to the back deck to get in a spot of painting/mess-making before bedtime.