Jack Johnson, Ben Folds, Animal Liberation Orchestra, and Olive.
She jumps with bent knees and hips flared, arms above her head and a smile that pauses my thoughts about all the unresolved issues from my day. I forget about my work as a an elementary counselor at a school where 75% of the children survive and thrive beneath the poverty line.
I throw my hands in the air and sashay across the kitchen. I dance with my daughter, stopping time with our movements, chores abandoned, faces forgotten, just shoulders and hips and feet and the rhythm and beat of a song.
Watching The Sing Off with Elias.
One of the judges, Shawn Stockman, tells a singer named Christy, "Your voice feels like warm butter on grits."
"Christy your voice is like warm butter on sticks!" Elias laughs.
"We do have the same name." I say.
"Warm butter on sticks??!!!" Elias repeats
"Warm butter on grits."
"Warm butter on windows!" Elias laughs. Playing a familiar game where we play with words to make silly statements.
"What? Warm butter on windows?" I tickle him under the blanket. He laughs so hard no noise comes out of his mouth.
I pause.
He looks toward me with a contagious smile. "Your voice is like warm butter on a chocolate ice cream cone!"
Elias knows my voice better than he knows my face. As a legally blind seven-year old he compensates so well for his lack of sight that I often forget he can't see.
"Is that Olive or Canyon?" Elias asked yesterday when Audrey's two-year-old son visited. He stood a few feet away but couldn't discriminate the details. Couldn't identify his sister from another child with similar coloring and hair.
Oh yeah, he's legally blind.
And yet he is learning to read.
Slowly. With the book a few inches from his face, he reads, sounding out words or reciting memorized ones: The trouble with fame is having a name that people know. Fans look at me and whisper my name just because I play a game...
I have to say, "Check," often as he reads, to remind him to look at the whole word without seeing one or two letters and just saying the first similar word he knows. But my little 24-weeker whose eyes once danced even crazier than Olive and I in the kitchen is discovering the world of words.
Who knows where this will lead.
I watch Olive speak volumes with a look, move with such ease, and I suddenly know how hard everything is for my son. And yet here he is. Walking onto the dance floor, amidst the smell of salmon cooking and magnetic letters scattered on the floor, grabbing my hands, and swinging his body along with mine.
"Yiya! Yiya!" his sister says as she spins in circles with her hand in the air.
Tonight at dinner, I looked over to see Elias concentrating on his hands as he focused on pointing his fingers. I smiled at Nick who also watched Elias. Simultaneously we both pointed our fingers, mirroring Elias.
"What ya doing?" Nick asked.
Elias looked up and smiled when he saw that we were pointing our fingers too. Olive who sat in her booster across from Elias quickly followed. And I'm not sure who started it but soon we were all linked by our pointer fingers, a family connected around the table, waving our arms and laughing, just because.
yay for dancing in the kitchen! Loved this post!
Posted by: Jill | 09/21/2011 at 06:16 PM
Thanks Jill! The dancing continues, and Olive, like a girl after my own heart, doesn't want me to hold her hands and dance with her, she wants to be free to do her own thing, swinging her arms and jumping across the kitchen...
Posted by: Christy | 09/21/2011 at 10:49 PM
Those are great moments Christy. Make more of them. We all need more of them.
Posted by: fleming | 09/22/2011 at 09:01 AM
yup. we ALL need more of these moments. thanks christy.
Posted by: Kate | 09/22/2011 at 10:09 AM
We have moments like that with KayTar, too...except it is when we remember she is deaf in one ear. Usually it isn't noticeable, but once in a while a misunderstanding or particularly funny mishearing makes it starkly obvious...oh yeah, she's deaf!
You guys are a beautiful family.
Posted by: Kyla | 09/25/2011 at 05:31 AM