Lola

Your tenderness is almost unbearable. Your skin, your mouth, the pink tint of your eyelids, the skin inside your thighs, your naked feminine parts, earlobes, the roundness of your big toe, like sea-stone, your unhinged uninhibited laughter, your squat on the toilet, song in the shower, your hiccuping tears, finger in nose, the open slice of your mouth in sleep, long long arms round Daddy's shoulders, long long legs wrapped round Daddy's waist, the honeysuckle delicious sugar of your breath, your soft self-talk during play, the fever of your complaints, your absolute unabashed need to be cared for, watched over, protected, loved.

Our silent knowledge that I will not write, even here, in case the words are magnets that draw power into our lives and make the possible true.

When bad things happen, you are the pulse that the family keeps watch by. You are the soft baby of the family, the newest born to this life, the changeling, the one whose eyes are still a star, innocent. If you are moving in your unconscious ease and trust, then we are doing our job. Your hurts are still transitory. Your pain sharp but once gone, totally forgotten. The moment still captures you entirely. If Mommy is sad and solemn faced, you are concerned, and then you are rolling in barrel laughter on the floor with Daddy. Your brothers alternately protect you and push you around. You trust the boundries of their tease.

I look into your face and your pliable limbs and I see much more than the beauty of youth. I see what is renewable and what is the spirit of human life, before we are more complicated with the deductions of our mind. You are the reminder that life moves swiftly and that the most true and comforting response is the one we allow in and allow out like blood through the arteries of the heart. In, out. In out. Your smile flashes like the sunlight through the curtains.

I love you beyond that curtain.