This morning, when I ran to the door to buzz in our babysitter, I jangled. “Coins?” asked Caroline, as I swooped to pick her up, football style, using her ribs as a hand hold and my right hip as a saddle, trying to get to the door before the second buzzer sounded and C started crying (she suffers doorbell intolerance).
Caroline is counting everything she can find, from bricks on the wall to pieces of breadstick she’s partially eaten and then thoughtfully scattered across the carpet. She often counts the same thing twice, but she always gets to 10, now that she can. And then she says “tak.”
Czech dictionaries define tak as “so” or “thus.” Many people use it as a way of opening a sentence, or changing conversational gears and introducing something new. Our babysitter says tak when she finishes setting something straight for example, or succeeds in brushing Caroline's hair, and when she says it you know that she is happy with her results. C has picked up the habit too and it tickles me to hear her summon up a satisfied “tak” at the end of a counting game, or when a block fits well within her design of a Lego chair for dollies. It sounds so adult somehow, so careful, such an alien impulse in someone attracted to order as a means of demonstrating, yet again, the second law of thermodynamics.
We’re going to
After a quick round of “If-I-Will-U,” Will legged it through Saturday’s heat wave to
I tried to remember the last time I’d really relied on a guidebook and realized it had been years ago, just before we moved to Europe. In the month between quitting my job and moving over, we bought every book we could find on the
This weekend’s reading was more light hearted. I’m not worried about figuring out how to live somewhere, just how to pleasantly fill five days. I know, in general, what to do when traveling - what to look for when you land in an airport, how to use a metro, how to convert korunas to krone. All the basics set aside, I can concentrate on creating a fantasy schedule where we see everything and the weather is perfect, and then a real one, taking into account time, a toddler and a weather forecast that seems to indicate rain for seven days straight. Fun stuff, this day dreaming, and I almost understand a friend who traveled to Venice and spent her first day sitting in a hotel room pouring over the Venice Dorling Kindersly guide book because the pictures were so good. But not quite.
It was very quiet, last night. Because of the unusual heat, most people escaped to the countryside early yesterday, and at least two of the buildings in our square were completely silent. One – directly behind us – is the local courthouse, so it empties at 4 on Fridays and doesn’t stir until 7 on Mondays. Another, just next door, is empty of tenants, waiting to be sold. Only one older man lives there, the caretaker. I met him once when I went on a tour of the building. He reeked of sour sweat and alcohol, and spent the hour slowly shaking out keys to fit each door while trying to stay upright - showing off the meticulous intensity of a drunk in the middle of the day. At night his light goes off early and he never opens his windows. I can only imagine how hot his rooms must be.
Towards 3 a thunderstorm blew through, but it was just a little guy that had darted ahead of the high pressure system moving in from Germany sometime today. Afterwards it felt even hotter and reminded me of hot nights in Charleston when sitting outside feels as if you are swimming (and breathing) in the lightest of warm waters. When you have air conditioning to return to, that swimming sensation can be a magical experience. When that's the only air you've got, it can feel a little suffocating. Once the last light switched off in our courtyard, I came in and stood in front of the ice box, sipping a cold glass of apple juice and inhaling the freezer air. It was 4:30, and time to sleep.
Hot hot weather here. Very hot. I went out to a meeting today dressed in a pair of khakis and a light oxford shirt and all the women looked at me as if I were insane because I wasn’t wearing a sleeveless sun dress. The trams were furnacelike, the dogs looked melted and every child had an ice cream in their hand. But Prague is still not as hot as South
Ya'll keep hydrated, okay?!
Yellow is not a color I put on normally (I was once described quite aptly as greenish yellow by an Italian friend of mine, and I get even more greenish when I add it externally). But to drive by fields full – canola flowers in May, sunflowers in July – makes me want to swallow whole the view, to get out of the car and lick up the colors with a paintbrush or a camera.
Caroline seems to feel the same way about grass. Whenever she sees lawn, she runs to it and flies in slow ellipses, arms flung wide and her smile dashing ahead. Tall grass turns her into a lion and she sits on her haunches, seed tips above her head, splendidly isolated by her nest of green. She so rarely sits quietly that I am always surprised by this transformation from swooping swift to still lion.
We took our time getting anywhere, with two twos, and the getting there was half the fun – parents chatting, children holding hands and careening about like taffy being pulled from one side of the path to another. Together they met multitudes of butterflies, a tiny frog and a slug that was slowly crossing the road. They hiked nearly to the top of a hill, and helped pick raspberries. Caroline lioned in the grass, and then the girls sat on a picnic blanket and lapped up yogurt and crackers and even some good for you cheese. They didn’t speak a language in common, but by the end of the trip they could say each other’s names and that was enough for them.
