Steps

In my mind’s eye, I can see her. Mini-Morgan. My daughter-in-law’s firstborn with a golden splash of her grandmother’s curls. 

My three-in-the-morning brain imagines her inching down the echoey tiled hallway lined with colorful bulletin boards. She’s looking for Mrs. River’s room. I see inside the Pre-K den, “A-U-S-T-Y-N,” by a hook where she is to stow her belongings, and there again on a butterfly placemat at the table where she and her navy blue thermos, also bearing her name, will call home base for a while.

My brain runs “shorts” of how it all goes down. I see her pensive, the way her daddy was when he first ventured out. I see her face awash in wonder, the way it is when we look for roly-polys or find snails half-in, half-out of shells or stand posing like a statue in hopes that a butterfly will land. I see her insides grinding behind her almond-shaped green eyes as she connects the dots of incoming information, ordering them with a through-line that makes what she collects her own. 

The episodes flip inside my nocturnal projector. I nod off knowing that I must learn again (as if three decades worth of practice haven’t been enough), that we must let her go.

I pray that she’s scared just enough to pay attention. That she makes fast friends. That she listens and does what she’s supposed to, and that she doesn’t, when things go other than the way she’d like them to, throw any huffy hissy fits. I pray that she’ll stay safe without isolation.

A four-year-old foundation is absorbent. I pray for all she will and won’t soak up.

Daylight comes quickly. I rise to meet it, go about my normal morning business and am out-of-context startled when I hear the cell-phone bing. I pick it up and read the text: “She has been dropped!” 

I smile closed-lipped and squeeze my eyes. That’s so her point- guard mother. Facts without emotion. Move on to the next play.

The four-year-old sponge with a unicorn backpack has officially stepped out in the world.

P.S. These Are The Days