Shopping with Clara

Since today was Earth Day, I planned to spend most of the morning and early afternoon taking advantage of sales.  Sometimes I do that: plan and organize an industrious day.  The thing I still don't take into consideration, even after fifteen months, is the vicissitudes of a tiny person in a tulle-trimmed pink tank top and neon-green Crocs.

Clara hadn't had a proper breakfast and was complaining of an empty belly even before we had fully backed out of the driveway.  I passed her some prunes from my purse.

We passed an open house at the North End Organic Nursery.  Clara was interested in the colorful booths and live music, but the fatal, sucking black hole was the bouncy house that had been set up.  We stopped.  We watched older kids bounce in the bouncy house.  There was face painting and kids could plant a seed in their own little pots. I held her by one arm while enveloping her in a cloud of sunscreen spray mist.

After the open house, she was too hungry to continue to the stores without food, and prunes weren't going to cut it.  Rather than go all the way home for lunch, we stopped at the Co-op to buy a salad from the deli and a whole wheat bagel to snack on.  The sun shone brilliantly.  There were dogs on leashes walking down the sidewalk and people on bicycles that had bells.

I thought about the mall: overly-perfumed, filled with a nauseating profusion of clothes and merchandise. Dark.  Indoors. Too much to ask of a baby, surely.  Babies need grass and sunshine and trees.

We went to the park and had a picnic with our food.  Clara chased a squirrel, shouting, "Arf!Arf!"  I explained it wasn't a dog, even though it had a fluffy tail like some dogs.  She watched it scamper up a tree and tentatively grabbed at the bark.  "We can't climb trees like squirrels do," I said, "But someday you might be able to climb a tree by holding onto the branches."

We went down the slide seven times.  We climbed across the playground equipment.  Then we went down the slide three more times.

Clara rubbed her eyes and asked for her baby to hold.  We drove home for her nap.  We had not gone to a single store for sales or bought a single thing on my list, but Clara was tired and sweaty and happy. And I guess I was, too.