Overheard From The Back Seat

(Note for anyone confused about why the kid can't wear summer clothes in July: I'm still copying stuff from the old blog to this one, so this was written last spring.)

Lillie and Francie carry on quite detailed conversations in the back of the car, on a good day. (On a bad day, they escape from their carseats every five minutes and screech nonstop about wanting ice cream or McDonald’s.)

This morning, it was a version of one of their recurring games, “Mom and Sweetie." One of them is the kid, called “Sweetie," and the other is the mom, called, well, “Mom."

Lillie was Sweetie today. She says her lines with the projection and precision of someone reciting on stage. Wafting clearly from the back seat come statements like, “PLEASE, Please Mom, can’t I have a sleepover? Just with my friends?" (She is not talking to me when she says Mom, which used to confuse me a bit until I got used to it.)

Francie’s lines as Mom are rattled off quickly and confusingly, a chattering patter. The individual words aren’t clear at the front of the car, most of the time. But I did hear some references to Summer Day, and how Sweetie will be able to do some of what she wants to do on Summer Day.

Summer Day. Francie staggers out of bed in the mornings, finding me like a homing pigeon, so she can ask me if it’s Summer Day yet. See, I got out the summer clothes already. It’s still too cool here to wear them, but they’re in the closet. It’s a twice-yearly ritual when you have lots of kids—getting out the boxes of stored clothing to see what will fit who (whom?) this season.

What mostly gets saved over the years is nice stuff. The shorts and T-shirts, although more useful, get worn out faster (unless you have lots of money and buy a lot of them, which we don’t). The ruffly dresses get worn to church a few times and stay nice, so they get passed on. Same with other families I guess, because ruffly dresses also tend to be what we get from other people who give us hand-me-downs, so between their stuff and our stuff, we have a lot of dresses.

Francie LOVES fancy dresses and shoes. Maybe it’s just her, or maybe it comes from living in an orphanage in Haiti and dressing in ragged stuff that didn’t fit for the first two years of her life (and no shoes at all). When she arrived here, one of her favorite things was a pair of tiny flip-flops, those shoes that stay on just by your toes gripping a thong between the big toe and the next toe. I’d found a minuscule pair that fit her in a thrift shop, and she wore them her first summer here.

We’d go to a local amusement park and people would actually turn on the sidewalk and stare at her feet. I didn’t realize why until one woman said, “You know, I’ve never seen a child that age keep shoes like that on." Francie, as most kids adopted from Haiti are, was very tiny for her age and had just turned two anyway, so she looked like a one-year-old. But by golly, she kept those shoes on, very carefully.

She was thrilled this spring at the closet full of flowery, fluffy dresses, and devastated that she didn’t get to wear them immediately. I kept saying they were for summer. That has expanded in her mind to “Summer Day," a wonderful time when she will get to wear all the impractical stuff in her closet. Reminds me of that song from Finian's Rainbow, about the great "come and get it" day when we'll all buy our gals that calico gown and our mules that acre of ground.

I guess I need to find some flip-flops in her size.