Escape attempts, snowy Sunday morning style
This is the bath I took today, hiding in a dim room while the grey piled high and drifted down outside, trying to avoid the alternatingly happy-then-furious-then-happy-again shrieks of my daughters (the boy's away this weekend) and the hormone-induced migraine that's going to keep following me no matter where I hide.
The girls only snuck in once (the bastard headache stayed the whole time, though), and were rapidly shooed out again by their dad, but he forgot to also remove the cats who came in with them, so my last 20 minutes of lounging and attempting to ignore the world were loud with insistent, kind inquiries about the fact that I was all WET and wasn't that worrisome and "Mom, are you ok?" (pronounced more like "ppreeow?")
Abby, I thought, would have loved this bath, but probably had something more eloquent to say about it. The company, concerns and all, was darling. Well. Except for the part where the black one started nipping at the white one and almost dumped him, claws and all, in with me, such that that sliver of white, freckled knee you might barely see in the corner there came close to ending up raked and bloody. She'd have had something funnier to say about that, too, though. And it probably would have involved a folk-song soundtrack and at least one lit candle. Because, basically, Abby was more interesting and eloquent than I am about pretty much everything. Which isn't a truth that can be escaped, any more than can the terrible finality of her story, or the locking down of all the gorgeous prose she wrote that I, having been numbered among the un-chosen, won't ever be able to see again. Fortunately for my state of mind, however, the other thing that can't ever be escaped for long is the high-voiced, dizzy whirlwind of little girls about to leap back on top of me, one of them making my body an ocean for a handful of plastic mermaids to swim "in," an activity rich with chattery, if repetitive, single-authored 'dialog,' while the other sat on my arm enlisting my help every few digits in counting to 100. Eloquent and interesting have their place, but sometimes it's just fine that this isn't it.