The Blue Juice

I've been subbing in special ed for 4 days now. When I get home and my kids talk to me, I'm amazed to see them moving their mouths and hearing complex things coming out. They walk around like, unsupervised, and they can move all their limbs AND have a conversation like it's nothing, like they're sailing in San Francisco Bay with their hand on the rudder, trailing their other hand in the water.

This living without pretty much any complications except for the usual bills and home and life is like the neon blue juice they pour on your icey snowcone at a Farmer's Market. It is impossibly bright and it is so sweet.

I get to walk out of there in a few days, done with my job there and on to the next school and group of people. But that little group is there forever, working in their tiny circle of ABC's and writing their name and playing bingo. While my kids are expanding outward, flying forward to college in Camarillo, swimming deeply and happily in Advanced Calculus, editing videos about what's important to a ten year old here in Shadow Hills, in 2018.

I'm grateful I got the chance to sit with this group and I race like hell to get home after work and see    my life, regular and layered, people look me in the eyes and they know themselves, and they can walk alone and get where they're going, safely. I remember when Bess was little and wanted to be Peter Pan so much. I hoisted her in the air and held her up in the sky so she could fly. "Now let go," she said, fully expecting she would take off flying.

These kids, they're already all flying, I didn't know it.