When we arrived in June our city feet inched along the raised shells on the sand feeling every edge and sharp place. "We need summer feet", I declared. Imagining my Swedish cousin from the summer I was 16 and took a family trip to the "old country." Jon walked barefooted all summer; his way of soaking up as much warmth in the short season with the endless nights.
Milo and I took our Sunday shower yesterday and I attempted to scrub the dirt from the soles of his feet with not much luck. The surface dirt came clean, but the ground in part, on top of the strange blisters (that look like barnacles) remained.
I am careful to wash around his skinned knee in two places. One from the rock on the hill where we see the snake and one from the bit of road, on the day we tried to have a nap on the beach but you can only demand a child deviate from the routine for so long before the wheels come off.
I want to call all of these patches of skin proud now. Proud skin. Proud of how the boy adopted to another life. Adapted to different sets of people, different kinds of attention and different ways of doing our days. In earnest he said more than once that "we don't need to go back to San Francisco, we can stay here, it would be okay." It's prettier here, there's more outside here and my five year old is in love with the view.
The marks on his knees might scar. I hope he rubs his fingers over the new colours of skin and remembers listening for the snake. I hope you doesn't always remember his mother marching him up the hill, in tears, because I was certain it would be easier to deal with the cuts at home with water rather than stopping on the path. I hope he remembers the good bits, daily swims, dinners outside, seeing eagles; not his mother weeping near boxes of books because of tidy handwritten notes. Maybe I can see my own scars as moments of pride now too. The little row of burns along my arms from forgetting how hot an oven is. My own raised knee flesh from falling off my bike when the wind was knocked out of me.
As we start our final week here, just he and me, the time is racing faster than I can stand. I want to squeeze as many moments of goodness into each hour as possible. A grand idea, but reckless. We have our summer feet, we have proud knees, what more do we need?
Inspired by Jane Hirschfield what binds us