Sand Through Fingers

Took the family to nearby Kennedy Grove Regional Park today. The girl does not crawl yet, and had always stayed in the sling or stroller on previous trips to the playground, but today seemed a good day to expose her to the sand. She sits up well, so I slipped her out of the sling and sat her up next to me at the edge of the playground, with a view of mumma pushing brother on the swings. Then the sand feeling lesson began, not just sand of course, but eucaylptus leaves, twigs, bark, berries, little bits of shell, etc. My soon to be 8-month old darling would do most of the teaching. My teaching consisted of redirecting items that headed mouthward. Her teaching took me through a review of every time the ancestors in my nervous system played in the sand since the first vertebrates strayed from ocean depths sandy shores, from flippers to feet, very Piscean. She reached forward as far as she could with both arms extended, to grasp whatever she could with both hands, and examine it as it it slipped through her tiny fingers, then feel the texture of any items that remain. She got real excited, tried to eat some eucalyptus leaves, ended up eating a few tasty grains of sand, mostly quartz. Sand will speak to me in a clearer voice for the rest of my days, after my magic daughter's mini-workshop on sand enjoyment. We all had a delightful time, and got a reasonably far hike in too, just a bit muddy, only the boy fell.

She's jumping out of her skin to type something here so:

. nf≈ ≈ 

Whoa there Nelly! Too many commands.

Got a quick bike ride in earlier in the day, and somewhere along the line smelled fresh cut grass, felt the wolf inside me pump canine impulses all through my extremities and incisors, rode faster. That wolf grows wilder every year, fantasizing about loping Jack London novel endings, ordering his meat ever rarer, practicing that bloodlust bay, hoping for spiritual solutions.

Rode past a marble in the gutter when almost home, thought to myself "Don't pick it up, you don't need it." But I wanted it, heard it calling me, so I circled back and put in in my pocket, christened it a talisman of the joy of youth. I love my marbles as a kid, some of which I got from my grandmother, including a clear one with a lioness inside it, my favorite. I would imagine life inside that spherical solid glass cage. The lioness radiated gratitude when I played with that marble, because that was the only time she got to move and see different vistas. Sometimes I'd even roll her around the pages of my book that showed pictures of lion habitat in Africa. I hereby declare it cool to walk around with a scratched up marble or two in your pocket, for the purpose of invoking how life felt through the senses of a six year old.