Happiness in a child's hug...

I had Yamaarashi-chan over for dinner yesterday, and that was quite wonderful. Omaha was in a bit of a bad mood, understandable given the constant stressful hits she's been taking over the past month or so, but she was still active enough to have dinner on the stove. She's so tough, and I am so lucky to have someone as strong and beautiful as she is in my life.

The girls immediately ran outside to play in the back yard. I checked the yellowjacket nest I had bombed the night before; successfully dead. We'd found where they were coming from: a nest under the eave of the garage corner closest to the front door. Naturally, some would fly in as a matter of course, especially since the girls are constantly forgetting to close that door. I've put a stop to the worst of it.

I stayed outside with the girls and they helped me find apples with disease or signs of rot and we clipped them while we talked about how to take care of a tree, not in some new-agey help the Earth way but in a direct way: if we want apples, we have to treat the apple tree a certain way, and that means pruning and clipping. It was like something out of an old Anthony Quinn film, sitting under the orchard, children gathered around as I showed them where the worms got into an apple, or what fungus looked like on leaves. They don't make movies with that kind of light anymore. We gathered up all the bad apples and I mashed them into the composting bin and stirred them, then lidded the compost. It's been losing moisture more rapidly than I like.

Dinner was chicken stew in a pot, an excuse to use up the potatoes in the bin and the vegetables left over from the London broil disaster. It was very delicious, and Yamaarashi-chan ate quite a bit of it. We played a round of Sorry! which I won (although for a while there it did look like Kouryou-chan was way ahead of the rest of us) and then it was time to take Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's house. As I drove home we talked mostly about the moon. I tried to get her to sing Aye, Barbary with me, but she said she didn't know it, which surprised me since when she was little she used to listen to Heather Alexander all the time. Then, when she was getting ready to leave, I gave her a brief hug, but she wouldn't let go. "Daddy," she said. "I love you."

"I love you too," I said. "But you have go in there." I gestured towards her mother's house with my chin.

"Yeah, I know." She finally let go and made her way out the passenger side door. I watched her go in through her front door.

When I got home, Omaha was putting Kouryou-chan to bed, so I cleaned up the kitchen and then took on the weekly chore of mopping the dining room and kitchen floors. It's amazing what children can glue to a floor in the course of a week. Omaha got me these nifty, butch blue housework gloves that definitely suggest a mad scientist at work. I gave Kouryou-chan and Omaha each a hug goodnight.

That little Filipino shop...

The coffee I make at home is so much better than the stuff at work. It's the same brand, and I steep mine in one of those tight-mesh coffee strainers while the office uses a drip maker, but I cannot imagine that makes that much difference.

Someone came through Pike Place Market last night with a broad-tipped paintpen and marked walls, glass storefronts, and newspaper vending machines all along the Eastern wall with swastikas and various racist epithets and slogans, most of them threatening. The alley inside, however, was alive with the morning routine: fish, produce, and flowers were being moved around on knobby-wheeled wagons by rough-looking men and women already bright-eyed and cheerful and ready to take on the day. I picked up a grapefruit from one of the vendors under the covered market, then walked up Post Alley to the bus stop.

There's a little Filipino Imports shop next to the bus stop that I always enjoy looking into. It has a kind of naive earnestness that you just don't find in our oh-so-ironic America. There are statues in the front window of a topless woman and man in different embraces, obviously meant to suggest passion, but my only real thought when seeing them is that they must have come from some X-Files crossbreed, as the artist gave them fingers twice as long as their palms. There's also white plastic statues of Poseidon grabbing a hapless mermaid next to a sitting Indian Buddha with a swastika on his chest-- guess the message that that's not a popular symbol in the West has missed some people. There's also a Chinese Buddha-- the fat, laughing man-- further behind, and behind that a row of fake Egyptian effigies-- buff, jackal-headed men standing next to implausably endowed Isis statuettes.

I kind of miss-- and regret-- the sort of innocence on display. I try not to be nostalgic about it; as always, I believe that we've achieved far more with maturity and wisdom than we have with arbitrary innocence and gatekeepers of our moral worth hounding our every decision. But sometimes the emotion of that little store, the anecdotes that must live in every handcrafted piece of native artwork produced for us silly Westerners, tempts me to indulge in a moment of humane atavism.