Everything is finally waking up. Almost all of the raspberry canes now have leaves on them, and buds are poking out of our single blackberry cane. The irises are resurrecting themselves, and the grass has turned a dark green.
“It’s about time!” is just about what all of us would say. I’m not sure I recall being so glad to see winter go in years. The winter months in South Carolina are usually so very mild that I feel we really haven’t had a winter at all, but this year, there’s no doubting it: we had winter. And it hung on for a while. And kept coming back even after we thought it was gone.
With the arrival of spring, though, come new chores, chief among them watering our new blueberry bushes, six here, six there.
In typical fashion, the Boy watches and then quickly imitates. It’s as if he’s constantly thinking, “Oh, so that’s how you do it. I’ll have to give that a try.” He remembers details from previous days, little touches that I’m surprised an almost-two-year-old sees.
Some of it has been simply funny. A few times I gave him his bottle when he was younger, I held it as if I were a sommelier at some fine restaurant; he soon began doing his best imitation just before lifting the bottle to his mouth.
Yesterday, he watched me try to jump-start K’s car. “Try” only because the battery was too dead and my small, thin cables didn’t have the capacity to deliver that amount of power — too much lost in route due to the inefficiencies inherent in current.
And so when he finds the jumper cables sitting out, he does the logical thing: he tries to attach them to his toy fire truck.
The Girl has her own concerns, though, like a budding reading obsession, that leads her to stumble and fall as she walks and reads. Or was that just the dramatic, theatrical part of her personality, pretending?
“She did that on purpose,” K laughs as I snap pictures. Still, the end result is amusing, even if faked.
Later, in the hammock, she reads aloud to me. She stumbles over a few words, proper names mainly, like Ester, but by and large, I just sit and listen.
Words like “gracefully” gracefully fall from her mouth as if she’s merely telling the story herself, from memory, with the inflections and drama of a professional storyteller. Well, almost.
