IV

There are so many more important things to write about.  Cold weather, big dumps.  Hockey hockey hockey.  School. Her. Him. Him. Him.  And yet, I'm so uninspired lately.  Maybe I have seasonal disorder syndrome.  Not sure.  Get up. Drive over the gap. Teach. Drive home. Make dinner for people who don't like it, don't want to eat it.  I hear it all the time from them: "no food in this house," "nothing to eat," "don't want to do my chores," "don't care about allowance," "don't care that I don't have clean socks," "don't care that I have shorts on and it's -8 outside," "don't care that I don't have a book to read," "don't care that...".

I'm home from work.  I pull into the garage, which is under our living space, and all I have to do is start up the stairs before I see her wiggling butt at the top.  I know that when I round that corner the boys will be watching t.v. (again), jackets still on, homework not done, piles of laundry they were supposed to fold still in the basket.  And somehow her wiggling butt makes me not care.

 She's pulled every scrap of wood out of the wood bag, she's ripped up our whole bucket of newspapers for fire starting, she's opened up the matches box and has spilled 150 matches, she's dismembered a stuffed animal- its inners strewn about on her rug.  And somehow her wiggling butt makes me not care.

She's found my yarn supply and tears apart perfect skeins.  Pulls my handspun yarn from its bobbin on my spinning wheel.  It's a spiderweb on my bedroom floor.  She finds my lost socks and collects them on her bed.  I like having mismatched socks to pull on in the dark at 5:24 when she wakes me up every morning.  And somehow her wiggling butt makes me not care.

She likes his slippers best because they have fuzz on the inside.  She likes his leather gloves second best because they have grease on them.  She likes my earlobes third because they're soft and chewable.  And somehow her wiggling but makes me not care.

I found a Bee hair lodged into the fibers of my fleece pajamas the other day when I was folding them.  They had just gone through the wash.  I have washed these pajamas already once since her death in September; so this hair found its way, wove itself into my fiber, sometime in the last couple of weeks.  Too long to be an Ivy hair, Bee was making herself known.  I miss her.  We have moved on with this new wiggling butt, but I wonder how she and Bee would be together.  Two black bundles of love hurling their way into my heart.  But alas, Ivy now has her hair mixing into the corners of our hearts with all the others- Bee, Liebe, and Sydney's.  Ivy likes Sydney's brown chair.  I wonder if she smells Sydney's scent still there.  

I have papers to grade, a stove top to clean, floors to mop, laundry to do.  It's zero degrees out and too cold to play.  And somehow her wiggling butt and peanut butter breath makes me not care.