“It is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.” ~ Charles Dickens

Sadie is eight years old today. She’s no newborn, but she’s as fresh from God as anyone, small or big, I’ve encountered.

A special needs child, she has challenges, they say. I’m not a glass-half-full type of gal, but Sadie’s teaching me to become one.

She won’t always make eye contact, and she won’t answer a question or tell me about her day. But she wakes up before dawn singing church songs and jumps up and down for joy and strokes my cheek and deems it “very, very soft.”

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I felt like Captain Von Trapp when I glanced out the kitchen window and saw one of my children a good fifteen feet off the ground, clinging to an oak tree.

Maggie was beating the branches above her with a stick as long as her 12-year-old self.  Sister Emma was scampering around the ground below, holding my big straw basket.

“What on earth are you doing?” I called.

“Muscadine-ing!”

Of course.

How they spied the vine so high above eye level, I don’t know. Children see better than adults. That’s probably because they’re looking.

Remembering last summer’s jars of muscadine jelly, made by their grandfather, or “Pops,” who has a gift for making substances sweet and sticky out of almost anything, the girls were eager to present him with the fruit of their discovery.

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“Shall we dance?
On a bright cloud of music
shall we fly?”
~ from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I

This morning I got stuck in traffic, waiting eons for the policeman directing cars around a fender bender to wave me through the intersection. I sat there while Sadie screamed, and I tried to memorize the scene. I do that a lot—I isolate what I think will be the day’s low and then try to think about it when I’m finally tucked in bed that night, ready to sleep. I’ve been doing this since middle school, when I’d usually remember being at my locker, rushing to find my social studies book or gym shoes before the bell rang.

It sounds sadistic, I know, to pinpoint the worst of a day and hold on to it. But it’s calming, lying there cozy and safe, thinking about how rummaging through the locker is behind me, far away, and all I’m left with is a dark, cool room and a soft pillow. Blessed contrast.

But I miscalculated today. Thanks to the traffic, we arrived at a doctor’s appointment 15 minutes late. They punished us good. I chased my special needs seven-year-old up and down hallways and out of people’s offices and away from other kids’ sippy cups for an hour and a half before we were ushered into the exam room. The doctor came in and then Sadie decided to mess her diaper. After this performance she sat on my lap, and it got on me. This is the day’s new low, I decided, as I stood under the open trunk of our SUV in the hot parking lot, using half a box of baby wipes on her backside and the other half on my jeans.

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“A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me.’ ~ Alain de Botton in The Art of Travel

Epiphytes, plants that grow on plants, are irritating me today. After a visit to the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s conservatory, that bewildering mixture of nature and nurture, I’m peevish. Orchids and vines and mosses and caladiums are growing vertically on tree bark, thriving on seemingly nothing but air and light and water. I can’t get things to grow, or stay alive, in $50 worth of mushroom compost and Nature’s Helper and mulch galore.

Topping all was the maidenhair fern living very happily halfway up a twisted trunk, its delicate, black wiry stems looking as if they were shooting right out of its host tree. Maidenhairs and I have a love-hate relationship: I love them; they hate me.

During my outing, I also saw ferns that grow in places like the rainforest in Madagascar. They look just like the ones suffering from heatstroke out in my shade garden, except they had no brown, curled leaves flopping onto the ground. Oh, and the ones from Madagascar had single fronds twice as tall as me.

I have fern envy.

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“The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself…”

~ Jane Austen’s Emma

“Not too much off—just so it’s grazing my shoulders, please,” I said.

“Like hers?” she answered, gesturing at the stylist working two stations down.

“Perfect.”

I watched chunks of hair fall on the floor and knew that the only way my hair was going to reach my shoulders was if I tilted my head to one side and stretched a section as straight and tight as I could. Oh well, I’ll have the cut I asked for by Christmas.

So I have bad hair. It couldn’t come at a better time. I’ve been struggling with two things lately, pride and authenticity. My ugly, short hair is a symbol (I make everything a symbol), a reminder of what does and doesn’t matter.

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