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Watch where it jumps off to

Okay, y’all, I am writing this down for me. Not for you–shoo, run along, go read the ad for the drunk kleptomaniac pet kangaroo that beat a burglar senseless (but didn’t run up the home insurance rates because it wasn’t dogbiting!) and that needs a new good home. Cheap! But only to a serious animal lover! Steel wallboard a plus.

Me, I’ll sit here quietly transcribing this for the ages. My ages. Because, as she reminded me while trying not to quite say it, they’ll be coming down on my head in no time, but meantime…

Sunday School was going on and two people were in that room who were clearly sick–so I quickly excused myself and sat down around the corner instead on the steps to the stage, glad for my knitting. I don’t like the sense of exile; I don’t like the germs; I do like staying alive. Should I have been reading scriptures to be a good example while being a bad example to the random eight-year-old going by? Ya wanna make something out of it?

Okay, then, in baby alpaca/merino/silk it is, the essence of softness in heathery royal blue, and I sought comfort in pretty yarn and good intentions of the season. (Hey, Morgan, now that I’ve already started this, what are your girls’ favorite colors?)

MJ, just a little younger than my mom and not in class just then either, came up to me.

“Have you been painted?”

Doubletake. Have I what? Surely I didn’t hear that one right?

She repeated, “Have you been photographed or painted?”

Total head tilt.

“Because you’re gorgeous.” I looked around to the other side to see who she was talking to, and I meant that.

So did she.

She asked me how old was I going to be next month? (We’re fellow December babies.) She described a little of what aging does to one’s face; I told her I’d had skin cancer off the top of my head and in the surgery had accidentally lost my grandma eyes, but I assured her I had had grandma eyes and said with a grin that I missed them.

“They’ll come back,” she nodded, and said I had it just right right now and someone needed to photograph or better yet paint me as I am. Right now, at the peak of perfection, basically.

This from the most-original-60’s-version-Earth Mother I have ever had the great pleasure to know. I so was not expecting a conversation like this. She was quite serious. (It dawns on me at last, proofreading this, that her late husband had been a serious photographer. The connection clicks: she was missing him a lot today after spending Thanksgiving with family with him absent and I didn’t catch it in time to remember him to her. I will now.)

I told her helpfully that my sister Anne was a professional water color artist, and with that she was satisfied. “Have them take lots of pictures,” she counseled me one last time before she headed for Sunday School, for Anne to work from or for my grandkids to marvel over later or to convince me or what I wasn’t entirely sure.

That stupid hair I was fussing over this morning while wishing I were way better at fussing with it?

For today, it totally would do.

Okay, y’all can come back now, I’ve put the vanity mirror down. Did anybody snatch up that kangaroo offer?

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