by Grace Stroup
Seeing
There must have been so much I just wasn’t seeing. At the end of August, I began nannying for a sweet and stout fifteen-month-old who goes by the silly name of Bird. So now, I begin my Monday and Tuesday mornings reading at my kitchen table, usually some kind of historical fiction, with a mug of hot lemon water and my espresso before hopping in my car and driving over to Wagener Terrace to muse at the birds, and kick a soccer ball, and hold eggplant delicately between our fingers. We throw sand around and all over, hop on swings that’re likely far too big for him, and walk down the same side streets, him babbling along in the stroller, while I mumble about all that we are seeing. And there is actually a great deal that I see every week with Bird.
They recently moved down here from Brooklyn, and their choice of house to rent proves it: it’s tiny. With a small entry way turned living room turned playroom, the house kind of just starts and melts until you reach the back. There’s a breezeway that serves as a dining room, with a small circular faux porcelain table on the right-hand side, three foldable wicker chairs and a highchair shoved into the corner. On the left-hand side, there are toys shoved into a dresser pawned off Facebook Marketplace, and cardboard boxes stacked up tall, still full of books. The Mom was a poet – is a poet – who did all the work to get her MFA, and then decided not to go. She’s been asking about my readings, and my work, and what I write about, in those little, small talk conversations we have right before I take baby Bird and give her the morning back.
The kitchen sort of just appears, potentially an addition to the house in a previous iteration, with a dinky gas range and linoleum counter tops, and spaces where nothing realistically can fit, so they’re empty. Ladles dangle above the stove, and on the back left-handed burner sits a cast iron, with remnants of butter, the caramelized milk-solids like bread-crumbs in the pan. They have gorgeous ceramic bowls and mugs, but they’re stored high up – almost as if they’re keeping a bit of life at bay, a reminder of how children stop us in our tracks and demand new sorts of routines, new lives, new mugs at eye-level that are silicone, things they can’t break.
Every week, something else is unpacked; last week it was a rug, two weeks before it was all of her daughters’ clothes, hung up in the hallway connecting the living room to the two bedrooms in the house. The backyard needs to be mowed, has the potential to be a nice spot to stare at the sky, and is just about the same length as the house from end-to-end. The neighbors to the right have a tree house in their backyard, something I imagine the children will grow up visiting, at least, I would want to.
It’s different over there than on James Island, bigger homes and more manicured lawns, with great views of the Ashley River, close proximity to Hampton Park, the Harbinger Café, and Leon’s, and lots of strollers and sidewalks. I arrive just after 8 in the morning, wrangle a mini-MMA fighter into his stroller, and then we begin. With us, we bring mineral baby sunscreen (did you know they made such a thing?), bug spray, (also safe for kids), water bottles (one for him and one for me), a rogue apple with a couple bites gone, a soccer ball, sometimes a book (though he really can’t stand to listen to me read to him), and often, his hat.
Getting started is a feat in itself, though. His Mom and I delicately play musical chairs. Some mornings when she’s still there, she places him in the stroller, I sometimes pretend to leave, she turns the stroller around so I’m out of view, and then I swoop in and take control. Sometimes, there is a protest. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to notice the switch, other days, he doesn’t seem to care that it’s me. But most days, he often tries to rip the buckle apart with his hand, shouting at me, as we take off and begin.
First, we start with the tree stump a couple paces down the block that is covered in plastic rabbits that look like baby bunnies. We stop, and stare, I pat the same one every time (we’re learning how to be gentle) and he points and speaks to me. And he is speaking – just not in a language I can understand. Soon, we will be stringing together sentences to one another. Perhaps just before Christmas he will be able to say my name.
“Grace,” I say.
“Mama” he says back.
“You’re just nearly there” I respond.
After we get past the bunnies, we hang a left, down towards Corrine Jones Park, but we don’t stay, we can’t, not yet at least. We must go further, must plunge ourselves fully into the day that begins just beyond the park, down towards Sans Souci, to walk by the house that just won “Yard of the Month” with the men who are pruning the crepe myrtles on tall ladders. He’s recently figured out what squirrels are and is yelling and pointing at each jump in the trees, each skirt and skid from these timid animals.
“Squirrel” I tell him, sounding out the consonants clearly, so slow that the word begins to sound made up.
“Squirrel, can you say that? Probably not.”
He says nothing, as he often does.
There’s a lot of that, me talking to him like an adult, and then a child again, and then again, almost kind of to myself.
He’s beginning to figure out how to say the word plane, and has come to recognize the sound of them in the sky, so every couple of minutes, especially when he’s started crying, we look up, trying to find the planes that are making their way to the airport. We remark on the shapes of the clouds, the blue of the sky, the mourning doves sitting idly on the electric lines. Or I talk, and he sits. Though I do like to think that he can understand at least a bit of what I’m saying. He’s learned recently that saying “hi” is associated with waving, and he likes dogs (at least from afar) so we wave to nearly every dog that passes.
As we head towards Clemson Street, he begins to lose his patience, because we passed the park and the stained glass door at the church up the road, and I’ve led him astray once again, so we stop to look at the recent Halloween decorations hanging from young palm trees. They’re skeletons – something I’m sure he’s never seen – just swaying and sagging in this soupy September. He looks at me, as if he’s trying to negotiate how to feel. I don’t know what to tell him. I’ve never been much for Halloween.
We plow along, past the live oak whose roots have mangled the sidewalk next to it, creating a little hill that we climb over and gracefully down, until we reach the edge of the park. He squeals, delighting in the fact that I’ve brought him back to a place he’s come to know, and it makes me curious about the formation of memory, and association, how all that works for babies, and I try to remember to remind myself to look into it later. I won’t remember, but it’s a nice thought, at least.
We bypass the tennis courts (not made for babies), and I try to avoid the basketball court for the first forty-five minutes (he dove head first into the concrete the first day I watched him), and we settle on the field. I park the stroller, and pull him out, a bundle of joy weighing in around eighteen to twenty-one pounds if I had to guess, slightly damp (the sweat), and sometimes happy to be getting out, sometimes not. He’s often in linen or cotton outfits, with no shorts, and stubby legs with no shoes, which I believe is a new decision – I can’t imagine his parents were letting him traverse the sidewalks of Brooklyn sans shoes, but really who knows? He’s going to be a southern boy though, after all. Living at the beach, sinking into the sand, jumping in puddles, the whole shebang. I get it.
He doesn’t seem to mind, though, likely because he doesn’t know any different. It makes me jealous sometimes, how gravel doesn’t seem to bother him, how he can walk through itchy wet grass to only dump himself into a sandbox, the mix of textures and touch not making him grimace. And then again, I’m thinking about babies and humans, and how we grow into bigger humans with complex opinions and ideologies about the right way to do certain things – to live – when really, we all started out as beings who were merely curious.
If he’s in a decent mood, and one where I can sway him one way or another, we start on the field with the ball and the grass, and the planes in the sky, and all of the dogs who come to play fetch. I kick the ball up in the air, high enough that it nearly grazes tree limbs, and then he runs (sometimes) to get it and kick it back to me. Other days, he just stares at me, before slowly trudging over, like Charlie Brown when he thinks he’s killed the Christmas tree, as if getting the ball is a chore, an annoyance. Even so, there’s never a day when he doesn’t trip on his own feet, falling aimlessly onto his stomach into the morning grass full of dew. There’s always a brief pause where he stops and almost decides if he’s hurt or not. He peers back at me, as if to check if his reaction was appropriate or not (it is) and I just tell him to get back up and kick it back to me.
Eventually, though, he remembers that we’re standing right next to this huge community garden, full of vegetables prime for the picking. We can’t pick them, of course, (the rules for this garden are only printed out and written on five different flyers) so we just gently pat them. We start by the mulch at the front gate, bang the gate back and forth in its latch a couple of times (for fun), before moving on to this rock that’s been painted with the words “Don’t Give Up!” on it. He loves this rock – probably because it’s something he knows I won’t let him take home – so we pick the rock up, and put it back down, pat it a couple times, walk away, point at it, walk back to it, and look at each other, grinning.
“Let’s go, Bird. Come on. There are eggplants we have to touch.” I remind him, to coax him away. He doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t even know what an eggplant is just by its name. He knows what it looks like – a deep violet tear drop, full of water, hanging like a water balloon in the morning sun. He loves them so dearly, so much so that he wants to try and tug every single one out of every single plot in the ground. He’s come to know we can’t pick the vegetables, though he tries his hardest. It’s becoming a game between us. He takes off, diving hands first into a jalapeno plant, tugging on the ripe peppers, laughing to himself, with an edge to his sounds, notes of mischief floating off his tongue, while I run after him, quickly pulling him back into me. And then we’re with the monarchs – sunset orange with splotches of buttercup yellow darting from one patch of wildflowers to the next. He is perplexed by the butterflies and is desperate for them to land on his finger, but he’s too boisterous, too loud, so they keep their distance. And then all of a sudden, he hates being held – can’t stand it— so he’s like a fish out of water in my arms, flailing and bucking, lurching his head back violently, nearly taking my chin out in the process.
So, down we go, again. But this time, we’re headed towards the rain barrel. We hit it hard with our palms, listening in response for its echo, how the water bounces off the walls, how it towers over him, how it towers over me. He bores of this, quickly, as do I, so we head to the other side of the garden and exit there after banging on the gate a couple times for good measure (for fun, again) with our sights set on the playground, which admittedly is my least favorite part of the morning. He’s too young for this jungle gym, but he doesn’t know that, nor does he believe that. There are steep steps, a climbing wall, a metal pole to slide down,(haven’t we graduated past these by now?), and a slide. I have to walk with him up into the cavity with four exit points to make sure he doesn’t fling himself through any of them, before telling him to wait, hoping and wishing and sometimes even praying, that he listens – that he’s come to know what the word “wait” even means –before bounding down the stairs and racing towards the slide to make sure his legs don’t get stuck under his knees and he falls face first, or that he weighs so little that he will fly through the air and so far into the field. But he does wait for me, sitting so quietly, so perfectly, not moving an inch, almost like that plastic bunny sitting on a tree stump, just waiting to be held.
He remembers again why he’s waiting – to go down – so down he goes, and then we are done with the slide, finally, at least until tomorrow. He doesn’t want to be done, but we are – I’ve only got one ride down the slide in me—so I must find a lone shovel in the mulch, or a plane in the sky, a dog walking by, anything to move us into the next moment.
Luckily today, the geese have started migrating south. They’re hanging low, just above the trees, shouting at each other in a marvelous song, and we can always hear them before we see them. They’re early today, but for us, they’re right on time. We saw them for the first time two weeks ago, so he’s come to recognize what the noise means, what it promises, and he begins looking up to the clouds, pointing, shouting, and we wait with bated breath for the V in the sky. I hadn’t considered it until recently – how wonderful it must be to see these birds for the first time as they float through the sky towards something warmer, always on the cusp of something new, a brighter morning and longer evening. And they really are near perfect in their uniformity, how they glide, the angle at which they’re holding steady, how fast they pass right on by, and it makes me wonder how they choose where to end each evening, and why not right here, on this huge field. It also makes me realize how little I know about geese, how my education on them really starts and stops with the movie, “Fly Away Home” which makes me then think about how that movie is actually slightly disturbing, and insane. It is confusing for him though, that these are birds, but he is also Bird. So I try to identify them by their names: geese, doves, warblers, night herons, ospreys, tufted titmice, chickadees, blue birds, crows, hawks. He doesn’t care or seem to know what I’m talking about, but I do, so it’s all right.
But then I’m back to the sky, and the perfect morning, the delight in seeing, the joy in today. He always yearns for the geese to last a second more, pointing and calling out to them long after they’ve passed, and then I’m realizing that I too wish they could linger, sit in our sliver of the sky a second longer, and then miraculously realizing that babies long for things to last too, somehow.
But now we’re past the playground (thank god) and onto the sand box, which is a nice spot to relax for both of us. I sit on the edge while he flings sand in every direction. I don’t feel like I need to tell him not to throw it yet, because he isn’t throwing it at anyone. Some days once we’ve reached the sand box he’s tired of noise, so we just sit quietly, and I watch him, and catch bluejays in my periphery darting from sycamores, the whir of electric leaf blowers in neighboring yards, the huge storm water trucks clearing out drains, bees hopping from one flower to another, palm fronds rustling, the warmth of the sun, the pulse of a day. It’s different: spending my mid mornings like this after two years spent behind the veil of a computer screen, grey emails and monotony, waiting for the day to pass only to do it all again, months on end. There’s just so much I wasn’t seeing, so much I yearned for.
And then it’s high time we should be getting back to the field, so I resort to picking him up and carrying him back towards our stroller, which he usually welcomes – he’s tired by now. This though, is my favorite part. If we’re lucky, there’s a slight breeze, even the odd gush of wind will do the trick. He knows it’s coming before I even begin. I place him down in the grass, softly, and he has to remember to extend his legs, like a horse learning to walk for the first time, knees slightly buckling, his body swaying, teetering and off balance. And then I extend my arms from edge to edge, stretching my scapula, creating space in my body that wasn’t there prior, before angling my chin up, turning my eyes towards the sky, quickly exhaling and opening my mouth, and letting whatever’s stuck in there: out.
He joins me and then we’re laughing, and shouting, running around, rejoicing in the morning, in movement, in all that we’re seeing. And I’m sure it looks somewhat odd, a nearly grown woman with this baby, shouting and laughing, spinning in circles, with their eyes towards the sky. Or maybe it looks endearing. Maybe it looks a million different ways. But I’ve never been much for caring what people think about me, and I’d like for Bird to feel the same way, at least somehow, someday, and though that isn’t my job, or my role in his life, it feels important to me. It also just feels good to release, to reset, and to start again. Which, really, when I think about it, is all that we’re doing.
But the moment passes, and now it’s time for something new. More moments to find and things to see. So, we’re back to the stroller, back to the protest, back to the compromise – if holding and squeezing the sunscreen out of the bottle means that he will sit long enough for me to strap him in, so be it. He’s often ready to go home by now, but we have to retrace our steps, to visit the skeletons and pass the houses, wave to the dogs, and I’d rather spend more time outside than in. I find that on the second pass through I’m more reserved, more introspective, perhaps too busy focusing on what I’ll do once I leave, and Bird is full of sounds, with much to say about what he’s spent his Tuesday morning doing. It’s a nice balance – we aren’t simply mirrors of each other. He talks and I listen, and then vice versa. As we make our way onwards and back towards the house, I can feel the day surging, the warmth of this coastal town coming to fruition, sweat gathering on my upper lip.
And as we bound the corner straight towards home, he starts getting antsy, frustrated even, and as I go to unlock him from the stroller, he all the sudden wants nothing more than to sit in the stroller, to last in this moment for a second longer. But we can’t, he needs to eat, and we only have so much time until he starts really losing it, so tired that he won’t want to do anything, so I kind of just pull him out, moving him to my left hip, water bottles in my right hand, him putting his hands in my face, pulling at my lips and nose, trying to tell me something about his displeasure. But march on we must, so I create some distance, and somehow move us inside.
Once we’re inside, he remembers where we are, why we’re here, and is more than delighted to eat his apple in his highchair. There are leftovers from his breakfast flung all over the table and the floor, books on the couch from last night, or perhaps earlier this morning. We sit in a comfortable silence now, and my mind begins to wonder – to what else I am doing today, where I need to stop on the drive back over to James Island, what the rest of the week looks like. Babies must not think that far ahead, and I’m not even sure they can, and what a joy that must be: to live fully for the present, to only know the moment right in front of you. I’m jolted back to where we are as the apple lands right in my lap, he’s thrown it at me, so now we’re done with this midmorning snack (I’m not one who takes well to getting food thrown at me) and he’s tired. So, into the sleep sack he goes – a blanket with a zipper basically, that I guess makes it easier for babies to fall asleep – before I place him in the crib. Today, he doesn’t cry. He just kind of whimpers, once or twice, and then realizes how nice his sheets feel, how tired he is just laying there on his stomach, his stuffed animals keeping him company, and waits for me to leave. I close the door, he cries out, and then he’s quiet, and I quickly rearrange the house, folding clothes and wiping counters, giving his mom any slight edge I can before she comes home and is thrown into the chaos again.
And then I just sit, with my book, in this tiny house, waiting for the next thing, musing on all that we did, on all that we saw, all that we will do the next time I’m here. By next week he might know new words, or jump at the sight of me (doubtful, but I’m holding out hope) or maybe he will be his exact same jovial self. And we will go see the rabbits, and see all the squirrels, maybe a duck, as the world turns and the sky gets muted, cooler blues and brighter whites, the sun and the stars pulling back, the day turning into my favorite season of the year. It’s a stark reminder of the passing of time, how last year at this time was nothing like this, I was different entirely, but still in this body, just not seeing much of anything, or taking stock of any of it. But we are not there anymore, we are here, today, right now. There’s much to go see.
Grace Stroup is a writer from Virginia. She lives in Charleston, S.C., with her fiancé and their dog, Bodhi. Her work has appeared in Rowayat, Short Edition, Bright Flash Literary Review, Rainy Day, Spare Parts, Typishly, and hopefully many more in the coming years. She writes about family, land, tradition, and loss. She is working on her first novel.
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