At 9:30, my daughter comes downstairs—she can’t sleep. She’ll be seven next month and the world is expanding around her, I can see it. She’s more aware of other people now, more aware of adult conversation, more aware, in this instance, of volcanoes. “Volcanoes?” I repeat, settling down next to her on the couch. “What…
Words (to her) are — well, I don’t know what they are. That is why we do the lessons. Perhaps (to her) they are birds — each word a flock of small, black birds. Or maybe miniature furniture moved into a room as my finger reveals them one at a time. When she gets distracted…
Children delight in the unseen. Since becoming a mother, I have consumed dozens of invisible cupcakes and sipped countless seemingly empty cups of tea, and it doesn’t trouble my daughter a bit when I, interrupted in the midst of some terribly grownup task, receive her baked goods with a blank look and say, “What cupcake?”…
