November 12th, 2006

We had three days of seventy degree weather this week and it was wonderful. Fallen crunchy leaves, skies that stark blue of autumn, trees still hanging onto swaths of red and yellow and yet, instead of that crispness in the air, strange warmth. Comfortable and kind. Then Saturday we had the threat of flurries, but they didn’t come. Kurt put in the storm windows. This morning we had frost covering the roof and the yard. Last week must have been summer’s last hurrah, and now it will turn cold in earnest. Both the previous Novembers that I have lived here it has snowed before Thanksgiving. The first time it was simultaneously magical and scary. I didn’t know that we wouldn’t be snowbound after that first snowfall. It melted and went away, of course, but I didn’t know when it fell that it would do that. This year I’m kind of looking forward to that first snow, and if it doesn’t happen before Thanksgiving I may be disappointed. However, I need boots before it snows. Which means buying them. I think I’ve procrastinated on that shopping chore long enough. I better get them this week or my feet are going to be cold. Also, all my toe socks have vanished since last year. Must have warm and cozy socks.

This morning I was sharing giggle time with my daughter. This is where she climbs into my bed and we just laugh together. She will say goofy stuff, eyes bright and fixed on mine, trying to make me laugh. When I do laugh, she joins me. Sometimes there’s tickling involved, sometimes just silly words. She’s working hard on the concept of jokes. She wants to make them up instead of recite them, but she tends toward the nonsensical and hasn’t quite grasped that it needs to make some sense, but be slightly off as well, as that’s what makes a joke funny. Anyway, we always end up laughing at either her statements or my jokes. I love these moments. They’re nothing special, nothing unusual, but neither are they daily occurrences. They’re just a part of how it is. I treasure these times, but I have no idea whether Sophia will even remember them.

When I think about that, about whether she’ll remember occasionally coming to my bed in the mornings and goofing around, laughing until we can’t anymore, I try to bring similar memories up for myself and I can’t. I’m not like Sophia; she has an uncanny memory, and my memory is poor. I cannot say for sure that I never played around like that with my mom or my dad. But I have no memories to suggest I did. I remember my brother sometimes tickling me until I thought I would pop while I screamed and laughed. But I don’t have any comparable memories of silly verbal or physical play with my parents. I can’t tell you whether this means nothing like that every happened, or whether this means I just forgot about it. In some sense I can’t even imagine a circumstance under which it might have happened, so my guess is that it never did. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they were already very middle-aged when I was born, or because they are just very serious people. My dad is definitely a very serious person.

So what will she remember? Will she know that we laughed together like fools, or will she remember only that I sometimes scolded her? Will she see an older me and state that I am now and have always been a very serious person? We shall have to wait and see, won’t we?

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