Wherever you go, there you are

I've got a busy day ahead of me. Elphine is turning 12 on Sunday and so I've got to go out and consider what kinds of things she can be given on that occassion, and I've got to haul in massive quantities of food so that I can spend the afternoon cooking for Shepherd's Bowl.

I feel a kind of crisis, with Elphine on the edge of being so old. First of all, in the muck and exhaustion of the early days, I never bothered to lift my eyes and consider this moment. You know, you're just always changing diapers and trying to keep all their wide mouths full of food so they won't be crying all the time. You just knuckle under and work really really really hard, and expect that it will be that way always. You'll just always be tired, always be covered in vomit, always have a filthy house. You don't notice that the ground is constantly shifting under you. You just add more work where other work was ceased. You don't notice that you're not changing diapers because now you're freaking out about the bathroom floor purposefully soaked with water, as if someone was trying to develop a man made lake.

I was wildly and angrily killing Japanese Beetles in the dusk last night and Elphine came and stood on my heels, as she does now, wherever I am, there she is, at my elbow, on my heels, breathing down my neck, a new infancy, really, looking up at me with her enormous brown eyes. The expression is of humor and happiness in the knowledge that she has the power to drive me crazy and is preparing to do just that.

“Now that I'm about to be twelve,” she said, “want to hear my life plan?”

“Alright” I said.

“I'm going to travel,” she said, “and write. Alouicious is going to be famous and he says he'll pay me to clean his house and cook. I can earn some money and then go traveling. And then earn some money and then go traveling.”

“That's a very interesting idea,” I said. “I hope Alouicious will pay you plenty. Nothing less that fifty to 100$ an hour.”

She wandered off and came back a few minutes later, “He says 30$ an hour.”

“You need more money than that,” I said, “and you'll be doing your brother a favor. So don't settle for something that low.”

Stupid child, she is constantly eschewing riches and fame. Her dream, for many years, was to live in a tiny cottage with a hundred children, and “to be very poor”.

“The bigger question,” I said, “is what God wants you to do.”

“I don't know yet,” she said, “but I guess I'll figure it out as I go along. It's a good to have a plan up front, even if it doesn't work out.”

So that's where we are. She is making plans and writing book ideas in journals and generally being helpful and cheerful. Once more the ground is shifting and moving. But I know better than to look farther down the road. Whatever you think you're going to be doing, it will probably be very different than that.