The girls and I, out walking in a park. A tree-filled park. We walk through the shade of countless branches and limbs, linked above our heads. Down the path we go, to the river.
We each have a stick for poking things.
As we approach the water, there is a scent in the air. A scent that fights for dominance over the lush green mossy earthy scent I have come to associate with Oregon. The scent fights for dominance and then . . . wins.
Kallan is ecstatic, “I smell death! Come on! I smell dead stuff!” and she runs ahead, dropping her stick behind her as she runs.
I throw up a little prayer that the death is of an animal sort and hurry after her.
Maj hangs back. She is more sensitive to smells lately, and this? Is not a good one. She makes her way to a sandy stretch of beach where the air is fresher and begins to gouge messages into the sand with her stick. I know without looking that her messages are all pleas for help . . . big messages of frantic emergency scrawled across the sand in hopes of catching the attention of a low-passing airplane.
I follow Kallan, “Ewwww, babe! It smells really bad, whatever it is. Do we really need to know?”
She is crashing through the underbrush, pushing bushes and wild blackberry thorns aside. We do need to know, apparently. I glance back at Maj, a stranded girl all alone in the world, carving out messages of hope.
OK, Maj is fine.
I crash in after Kallan, who is yelling at me from up ahead on the barely discernible path, “Its guts are out! Bring me your stick!”
Really?
Really?
Kallan is crouched happily over the death. A very large fish. Dragged here by something that did not get to finish its meal. There is a gaping hole ripped in the side of the fish, a messy window into what used to be life. Kallan is gleeful and reaches her hand behind her for the stick she has requested.
I hand it to her.
“Ewwww . . . look! Some of its organs are still here! Is this its stomach? I think so. And intestines. And liver. Everything’s all slippery! And look! One of its eyes is pulled out!”
She pokes and picks apart the fish in a crude autopsy.
Tries to gauge who has taken the first big bites before her stickish nibbles. Her guess is a raccoon. She also guesses that it was hurt or sick before it was captured, because it’s a very large fish to have been lingering healthily along the shores. And it’s not so long dead that there’s much chance it was dead before it was captured.
She’s like a fish Quincy.
Wait. Not so long dead. So then what’s that hideous smell?
I jump into the air to see if I can spot Maj over the tops of the blackberry bushes. Yup, she’s still there. Still unrescued and alone.
Look around. And not very far away, I find another large dead fish. All swollen and bloated and about to burst with the excitement of decay. Kallan is right behind me, with her fish-glistening stick.
“Oooooh, can I poke it?”
Not even.
“Please? I’ll hold my nose so I don’t smell it too much.”
Not even.
Kallan is all filled with longing.
Not even.
I take the stick from her hand and toss it high and into the weeds, “Come on. Your sister needs rescuing.”
We pick our way through the brambles and back to the beach.
Kallan runs ahead, reading Maj’s messages as she goes, flailing her arms above her head in exaggerated joy as she approaches her sister, “You are saved! You are saved! We have found you! We thought you were lost and gone forever! But you are saved!”
Maj looks up in alarm as her rescuer approaches, “What are you talking about?”
Kallan kicks in the sand at the letters of . . . Please send help!
And now it’s just . . . end help!
“You don’t need these messages anymore, Maj! We are here to save you!”
Maj is furious, “Stop messing with my words! Stop it!”
We are not the rescuers Maj imagined, apparently.
Maj swings her stick in front of her in a big wide arc over her artwork, “Back away! Leave my words alone!”
Kallan turns back to me, “She has gone crazy in the wild, mother. I am here to rescue her and she is threatening me with a stick. Does she not want to be rescued?”
“Come on, Kallan. Leave her be.”
“But I want to tell her about the dead fish!”
Maj is all sarcastic as she fixes her message, “Ooooooh . . . a dead fish. That’s almost like you found treasure.”
Kallan is stung, “Whatever,” and she walks to her own section of the beach, collects a new stick. Writes her own messages in the sand.
I sit in the middle. Run the sand through my fingers. Watch as the river undulates before us.
And then it’s time to go.
We climb out of the beach and back to the main path. We turn to take a last look at the girls’ handiwork in the sand.
Two halves of the beach.
Maj’s half is filled with the carefully aligned desperate pleas of a long-stranded castaway.
Kallan’s half is filled with flowers and suns and rainbows and two giant hearts traced into the sand. Inside the hearts? Two sisters’ names . . . Kallan. And in the other? Maj.
Sigh.
We set off, back the way we came.
The girls run ahead to each gather a new stick.
For poking.
Really enjoyed reading this… wish I wasn’t eating while reading it, but on the bright side – I ate less.
At my house? If I were to stop eating every time things got gross?
I would be a stick.
Get it?
For poking.
*Sigh* I love your girls and their words. Your endless love of (almost) all things Kallan and Maj fill me up with all sorts of happiness and good feelings. This brought me out of a pit today. :) Thank you.
Oh, I am so glad you are up and out of the pit!
I hate those mornings.
Thah Kallan…a girl after my own heart. I just love hearing out different they are.
Thanks, you!
I love this! I love that your girls love each other when nobody is looking. Reminds me of my older sister and me.
And my almost 9 year old would DIE if she thought she was going to have to touch something dead even with a stick. Absolutely die a dramatic death of girly screams and crocodile tears.
The girls are sometimes a puzzle to one another; they do not always understand what makes the other one tick.
But they love each other.
Kallan a little more demonstratively than her sister.
Another difference.
Isn’t it amazing how different two members of the same family can be?? My boys are night and day. But yet, Buster is much like my middle brother…looks, personality, etc. And Buddy is much like my oldest brother. But the weird thing? My oldest brother is adopted. Yet, they are like the same person, just that Buddy came along 35 years later.
Which just goes to show you that we all bring things to the table, but then the table at which we sit?
Changes us.
Hmm. Perhaps my mommy gene is kicking in. The thought of something dead & rotting didn’t slow down my chow of ice cream one bit. Didn’t even hesitate with the gouged out eye. Sweet.
Yeah . . . things like this?
Don’t phase me anymore.
At all.
Wow. Now that’s a girl with a good future in science.
Or as a serial killer.
Love the images of the drawings in the sand. Brings back memories of me at the beach as a kid doing just that. Proud of you for letting her poke the fish, I would of never!!!
Kallan has poked worse things than fish.
Way worse.
So bored… and overworked. *sigh*
Insomnia? Have you tried sleeping to get over it? I hear it works wonders.
*sigh* bored and being an asshole. Great.
Maybe it’s all this cold weather and lack of warm, sunny days. Seriously? It’s been cold. I prefer heat and I don’t “do” cold. Nope. Our dog is all pathetic looking- he started to shed and now it’s cold again. Shedding sucks. There’s clumps of fluffy undercoat everywhere this mutt goes.
Speaking of dogs, did the butt zit get fixed yet? Honestly, ewwwwww! Post a pic for all of us to be all amazed and disgusted. It’ll be pure magic.
*sigh* Summer depression? It feels like fall and I’ve had my summer stolen from me. I want my fucking summer replaced? Bring me a new one, honestly my old one sucked.
Magic date is August 24th. My first real hospital visit, so I’m a surgeon virgin. LOL… thinking of “like a surgeon… cutting for the very first time…” Love Weird Al. *sigh* I’m taking 2 months vacation from work. I’ll be all whining and pathetic, just the way Deb loves having me around. Me and the dog. Pathetic in our own special ways.
Sigh. You sound all sad and broken.
No photos of the butt boil . . . the swelling is mostly gone now. Seriously? At the moment it looks like she has two assholes.
No photos.
Two months of vacation???? Is that solely for recuperation? Or is it a real vacation?
And why is it cold there? That sucks.
Love you.
Funny how their surrondings are so fitting. I’m sad for Maj in this story. She seems sad or annoyed. Or both.
Sometimes? Maj is with us but not with us for a moment.
In her own world.
And our re-entry into her imagined solitude?
Is a pain in the ass.
Sticks are wonderful things. They can become almost anything you want them to be. Autopsy implentia, rescue-me-note-writing tools, sister irritants…oh the possibilities are endless!
P.S. I have no idea what Debbie was talking about back on the Coke Situation post. Your invitation must have gotten lost in the mail up there in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Hmmm….cleary this is the fault of the U.S. postal system. ;)
Hmmmm . . . perhaps my invitation was lost in the mail.
Perhaps.
Debbie sent me pictures, though . . . you guys look so in love and happy!
And you? In that amazing dress?
GORGEOUS!
As I sit with our new addition, the ever sweet piddle-master, Chuey, on my lap, I can’t help but think of how your Kallan and Maj are like my Rhett and Reese. Rhett would be right beside Kallan, and although only 3, he has a zest for life in general and a generosity of spirit that almost matches hers. Reese? Is sensitive. So sensitive and careful. We met a llama up close and personal on Sunday. Rhett laughed and delighted in this ginormous snorty new found friend. Reese nearly cried and asked to “go back”. Would I have it any other way? Absolutely not.
Same here.
It is frustrating sometimes to see the girls approach things so differently, and for them to so rarely find joy in the same things in the same way.
But would I have it any other way?
No fucking way.
I love who each of them is.
Kallan has the curiousity and stomach for medicine- autopsy doctors have to take about 8 years of university, don’t they? Start saving your cash!
ACK!
Maybe she can be a taxidermist instead.
Snort!
Before you think she could be a taxidermist, watch the movie Psycho III (1986) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091799/. The movie opens with Norman Bates stuffing animals. Problem is he doesn’t wait for them to die of natural causes… fun movie.
OK, again?
I do not watch scary movies. Ever. I am not clicking that link.
I have no worries about Kallan . . . she is all soft and sensitive and lovely with animals.
But if they have died, and if they have left behind their no longer needed parts? She likes to check that out.
I try to make her use a stick.
See, here is the difference between you and me as Moms: I used to give each of my girls a little paper sack, and we would go on TREASURE WALKS. We would collect feathers, little round stones, and colored leaves. Very healthy, very upbeat and kind of Norman Rockwellish. You, on the other hand, seem to have a little Edgar Allan Poeishness surrounding your family. Just sayin. Molly
HA!
We collect all sorts of treasure. The girls generally have bags for rocks and flowers and seeds and shells and other small bits of interest gathered along the way.
And sometimes we find bugs and slugs and dead stuff and mold and fungus and death and decay. How is that not also fascinating?
And we are all healthy.
HA!