My daughter

My daughter is small, dark haired, with a face like a monkey.
She is very solemn and intense.
She screws up her whole face when she yawns and squirms.
She is my whole world when I hold her in my arms.
My toddler has bruises on her face where she twirled too fast and fell and knocked her head on wood.
My heart stopped, and started again. She moves so fast I cannot reach her in time to save her from her own momentum.
Bright eyed and mischievous, she has a crush on her dad’s work boots.
Maybe they taste good.
The empty beer bottles at Christmas are not safe on the floor by people’s chairs anymore,
We will have to remember to pick them up before the little busy blue eyed girl crawls around to pick them up and swig the dregs.
My three year old loves Bambi. She stands on the front porch, where sounds bounce from house front to house front all the way down the block, and throws her arms wide and sings: LOVE is a song that never ENDS! Until the echoes can be heard all the way to the other end of the neighborhood. My favorite: MY MOMMY IS THE BEST MOMMY IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!!
In preschool she plays with the boys. She’s too energized for the girls, they are boring. Miss Yoko is traumatized one day when I show up to pick up my child, who has climbed all the way to the top of the monkey bars and fallen on her mouth. There is blood on her lip where her teeth almost went all the way through. Miss Yoko, tenderhearted and responsible, is in tears. My daughter is unfazed.
Sunday mornings she and her dad have a ritual while I am gone to work. They get the Sunday paper and he pulls her in the red wagon to the coffee shop. They sit together, have hot chocolate and coffee, and read the funnies together.
My daughter is the bravest child. When life with her second grade teacher becomes unbearable, we switch her to another school. She starts her new school all by herself, while Grampa is newly home from the hospital after a massive heart attack and Mom is quarantined with the chicken pox. She takes it in stride.
The other kids in her group of friends, at both her elementary schools, follow her around like ducklings. I hear a hawk scream, or an eagle cry, or a wolf howl, to be answered by one of her groupies. They rush to greet her with open arms at school, at parties. Younger kids in line for the school bus call goodbye to her.
The future tantalizes, unsafe but fascinating. The years of my daughter’s life flow past, melt together, separate and eddy in pools of years in my mind, kaleidoscopic memories of blue eyes, wicked grin, infectious giggles. I see the young woman evolving before me daily, and I am infatuated, proud and fascinated and curious. We struggle through thirteen, fourteen, laughing and crying by turns, together.