“Good morning, Sina!” he says cheerfully, standing in the door.
“Good morning, Paddy,” she replies in a soft hoarse voice, “. . . do you want to snuggle here?”
Without a word, he hops in next to her. I can hear him hum as he sucks his fingers and rubs his blanket under his nose.
Freshly laundered towels in hand, I witness the whole scene from behind the closet door with a sense of the uncanny, as if it is a scene from a favorite film, in which just one small, undecipherable element has been changed.
I put the towels on their shelf and peek inside my own room, disoriented. Under a tarp, the clock reads 7:15 a.m., as usual.
What in the world is going on? Sina, the queen of late-morning-early-afternoon sleep, allowing her three year old host brother to wheedle his way into the quiet space of her dreams?
To the mother of this teenager and toddler, this seems something of an apocalyptic event . . . on the scale of the lion and lamb becoming friends.
As two of our four bedrooms have become construction zones, the whole family is crowding into the two remaining bedrooms. Add the scabbard of fresh wood dust coating everything, the spotty water and power outages, and the militant arsenal of power tools we have to step over and around the minute we cross the threshold into the yard, you’ve got a sure recipe for a tall order of irritability and some very short tempers.
. . . The fact is, this home renovation seems to have made Nobel Peace ingénues of at least two of us in these last few weeks. The ones presently snuggling with each other.
I finish the laundry thinking of how far they had come over the course of the year.
- In early September Sina had responded to Paddy’s 7 o’something greetings with the upbeat and polite ‘please let me sleep a little longer’ of someone who clearly felt as if she were a guest in the house. He showed no indication he took her seriously, and instead proceeded to crawl all over her in her bed.
- By November the honeymoon was clearly over; she was heaving herself out of bed in a semi-catatonic state to carry him back into his room and sternly telling him to stay in bed until mom or dad got up. He cried, clearly shocked his charm wasn’t working. But he stayed in his room.
- By February, she was simply, sternly scolding him to get out of her room with a pointed finger when seven rolled around and he made his entrance. He relented and left quietly to play by himself.
- . . . and now, come June, they’d clearly made something of a compromise.
As I head downstairs to make a cup of coffee, I wonder if the house construction has something to do with Sina’s having welcomed Paddy to snuggle with her . . . if the perpetual chaos of bodies, objects, and events in our living space has softened her will. But this morning Paddy’s behavior had shown evidence of change too. He waited in the doorway to be welcomed, seeming to have become (at least a little) more sensitive, respectful of her needs and expectations for sleep.
I smile as I realize that with or without the wood dust, ours is a home under construction; in their careful consideration of one another, Sina and Paddy just might prove themselves to be master builders in the making.
In one week Sina will be heading back to another home and another family, one that awaits her eagerly in Stuttgart Germany, after her year here as exchange student has come to an end. By the time the dust settles on this house construction project, she will be gone. But in terms of this home construction project she committed herself to over the course of the last year, she will continue to leave an indelible mark.
I wonder, and worry a little, how Paddy will take the discovery she isn’t there when seven o’clock sets him wandering in search of her . . . and yet, having been a host parent four times over, I know that the end of her year here is just the beginning of a life of home-building between the two of the them, among us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment