The Golden State

Today is Sunday and Honey is up at 5:40 which is excruciating but it is one of the mornings I love, where she can’t stop kissing me and hugging me and laying her face on my face and her eyes shine with joy that is summoned just by my very existence. Normally when she wakes up so early and I try to get her into the bed for a cuddle there’s nothing doing; she says “Nyo” in an indignant nasal tone and she windmills her body around so her legs jut off the bed and she inches herself off hits the ground and starts tearing around the house. But this morning I lift her from the Pack ’n Play get back into bed and kiss her all over and she laughs her little seal’s bark of a laugh, the laugh of a person who hasn’t fully learned how to laugh properly, and I lay her on top of my body and she is all love and melting hugs and rolls off me to rest her head on the pillow and put her arms and legs across the bed like a starfish, periodically doing little jumps and jolts as though making sure the energy filling her small body is evenly distributed, then letting me lay my arm across her and get cozy and think she is just such a nice little tiny person. I feel the greatest sense of well-being available for love or money and I think Thank you God or whoever for this moment. After forty-five minutes of more or less unbroken cuddles touching my face poking my eyes saying “DAH” into my mouth she scoots herself off the bed ready for the day and it is time for breakfast, an egg and a banana and when that is done it is 7:15. If we were at home this would be a very respectable time for us to have finished breakfast, and I might have a chance to actually bathe while she stood next to the bathtub holding the shower curtain and crying for me to come out. It might actually have given me a chance to select my outfit for the day with some modicum of care for the sheer pleasure of looking respectable or like an attractive woman in the waning years of her prime. Every day I envy Meredith her beautiful clothes, expensive clothes or unusual clothes she finds on her prodigious travels. But she is also eighty pounds, bird bones that can perch as they are meant to on precipitous heels, visible panty lines that look somehow louche and obscurely elegant but would look obscene on an ass like mine.

Twenty minutes for stories and milk on the couch, although Honey is increasingly reluctant to sit through an entire story now, even the ones she loves, and begins rifling through the pages faster and faster until I can’t even rapidly paraphrase the illustration. I hope she is not hyperactive requiring treatment. Twenty minutes of taking all of the pots pans melamine bowls out of the kitchen cupboards. If we were at home leaving the house at five minutes to eight with my hair clean my minerals powdered across my face a little blush a cardigan and skirt and somewhat stylish sensible shoes we would be in excellent shape for an eight-o’clock deposit of Honey at daycare and a corresponding 9:30 workplace arrival. We would be off to a very good start, all things considered. But here we have no project for which this early waking and breakfast and stories-and-milk represents a smart and auspicious beginning, and no minerals to powder on my face.

So I decide we will go for a walk, a real walk, no stroller, while it is still cool and the birds are chirping and the heat of the day is a hint not a promise. We can buy a newspaper at the High Winds Market. I gather Honey put her into pants and shirt cover her face and chubby wrists and arms and hands and ankles with sunscreen and it gets in her hair and we set out on the move. The High Winds Market is closer than the Holiday but small small small and all the fruit is wax and shipped in from Ecuador and in the deli it’s baloney city. We stop to watch two deer and two perfect fawns in the undeveloped scrub lot next to the original Deakins place. The mothers look at us and Honey shouts “Daggy daggy daggy” until they tense up and bound away, the fawns wobbling behind them. Then it’s ten minutes before we’ve made it out of Deakins Park and that’s with Honey hustling her buns. This land is made for getting across on your horse or your wagon or the railroad. My mother told me that my great-grandfather used to ride a horse two days west every time there was a Freemasons’ meeting in Cassidyville, stopping to camp on the plains to break up the trip. That’s the way to do it. By the time we’ve reached the railroad Honey is lifting her arms to be picked up, and forgetting always the slow rate at which ground is covered in the high desert I don’t have the Ergo and so have to carry her on my own steam the rest of the way to the store. I hoist her up onto my shoulders and we stride through the scrub on the highway that leads to the market, and she puts her mitts on my head and sort of caresses my hair, what a funny thing she is. We are panting when we arrive.