Every month at the end of the month, Alvin writes a moon list in his newsletter, a way of looking back. I don't know the source—Alvin, let me know, and I'll cite it next week—but I tried to figure it out by googling and instead found a list of moons. There are so many in the solar system (and yes scientists are trying to find them around planets around other stars, too), and I can't even ever remember which are Jupiter's and which are Saturn's. (Any mnemonic would require more familiarity with ancient mythology than I have.) But I do love that Mars' moons are always called potato-shaped, because they are!
So I'm going to borrow half the moon list—it's the five senses, and then there are other prompts that I don't understand. I'm probably doing it wrong, but the only right I know today is "borrow a prompt to do some writing."
1. a taste - I left early for camp pick-up yesterday and stopped at a cafe on the way. The slice of bakery case for chocolate chip cookies was empty, but I asked anyway, and the girl at the counter said they were cooling off. She could give me one but it would be very hot, did I want it? Yes, yes I did. I took it outside and ate at the only table under an overhang, protected from the rain. The cookie was so hot that the inside was fully molten. Was it raw? Would I get food poisoning? I ate it anyway. It was amazing, I'm fine.
2. a sight - It's raining so often—daily this week, all last weekend—that the wildflowers we planted in every spare square of dirt are all heavy and bedraggled. I still love their chaos, but I wish they had more of a chance.
3. a sound - I've learned enough about birds to know that the creaky door hinge is a cardinal.
4. a scent - Yesterday Miles and I went over to our friends' house after camp let out. I say "our" even though at barely more than two years old, he doesn't really have friends yet. He plays next to, not with. But my friends from college live here, and their son goes to the same school/camp as Miles—he's about a year older—and we see them a lot. We've fallen into a camp pick-up routine where we park next to each other, I get there first and get Miles, and we hang out under the trees while my friend gets his son, then the boys stand around talking toward each other or to us, and sometimes my friend brings his year-old daughter, too, and she practices standing in the grass. Then we usually go our separate ways to fill the couple of hours between camp letting out and our spouses finishing work. But yesterday we all went back to their house in the rain, and the boys mostly didn't pull toys out of each others' hands, and mostly didn't scream too loud when it happened. And the baby toddled over to me with a book and I plopped her into my lap—she's only a few pounds lighter than Miles but she felt so tiny—and while I read to her, her head smelled amazing. Still like a baby, even though she's probably too old for that soft smell.
5. a feeling - I am really sick of needing to be the baby's superego, I barely have enough of that for me. I'm resigning myself to his essential inability to stop when I say stop, what with him being two years old, but the other option is a lot of grabbing, a lot of running and chasing in a parking lot, hefting him back toward the car while he giggles. I don't want to be the kind of parent whose two-year-old is scared enough of the consequences to stop when they say stop, but that makes this moment particularly unpleasant!
I don't want to end on that note, though. And I don't only ever want to write about the baby, but what else is there? God what a grim sentence. This isn't everything-is-copy, he's just always new, always doing something. Everything else can be rote, a rut, but he's always offering some new grammar or way of throwing his food on the floor. I don't think I'm gonna find a positive or profound ending if this is where my mind wants to be. Say a prayer for the polish stickers I just put on my nails that are already lifting up around the edges.
Thank you for reading! Please pardon any typos or sentences that fade out half-way, they're what let me send this out free and weekly. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is tinyletter.com/jaimealyse. You can also follow me on twitter here, and when my book is done and ready to be preordered this is where I will tell you about that.