I read about restraint collapse, the shoutmatch meltdown energy overdrive of nine hours of kindergarten dutifully holding it together unleashed on your brainmashed workdulled mother who wants to know all about your DAY! while I autopilot dinner and mental load a devil’s dozen other matters, and the weight, the ache, the hard to swallow, all of this is still my one precious life.
We need something better.
The heat is breaking, if only barely. We shed socks and shoes to touch the earth, wincewalk across the crunching horseherb, and prospect.
“Where should we dig, Mama?”
It’s not the best — digging random holes in our yard. But it is kinda my favorite. We eschew trowels for found tools, sticks and sharp stones, shards of terracotta to carve the parched ground. This flint is a knife. This concrete a shovel. Straggly moss balls brush away debris.
It’s too rocky to go too deep, limestone slabs the size of your hand, dinner plates if you’re lucky. As luck would have it, it’s what we’re after.
Rock maps. Stone clues. Artifacts for our quest.
As we scrape to unearth them, we cut into their surface, scratches transforming to cuneiform writing he prompts me to decipher, an extension of his nonstop demand for story. At five he still solicits me to talk stuffed animals, the barbecue sauce bottle, on the spot improvise a whole backstory, conflicts, objectives, maximum silly. We anthropomorphize everything. It’s fun. It’s exhausting Talk this commercial! what should be a quick biobreak or stolen scroll turned battle of wits with the TV on mute, ad libbing the earnest dopey ads like puppets.
“Read it, Mama.”
I inspect the latest limestone find, crosshatched chaotic like the tally of endless days. “You read it.”
He holds the rock aloft and proclaims, “This is Diamond Map Two, and it will tell us where the ancient artifacts are.”
We scoop away more soil, plucking out earwigs and undifferentiated larva, lichen fragments, acorn caps, small twigs, dead grass. I yelp at cicada husks. He collects the tiny whorls of shell. I stop loosening stuck stones when I know they reach the threshold he can handle them, bequeathing the thrill of extraction, the sweat seeping streaks of grit from his brow.
“Mama. Our words are just air.”
No lie there. Crescent moons of dirt beneath our nails. Rumble strip skin where it pinches into gravel. I fill pass measure kill treasure the time of my one precious life with my one precious life.
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