A Person So Soon

I couldn’t have guessed how much of a little person a six-and-a-half month old child could be. I didn’t know, quite, about the layers of intimacy that hours and hours of daily contact reveal and rearrange and change. One small part of baby’s life is her relationships with her “doggy brothers,” the two family pets. She doesn’t interact with them on an intensive level every single day, but every time she does there’s more there there. My daughter, it turns out, shares a universe with these two woof-woofs, a realm that exists two feet off the ground, where knowing looks signifying something along the lines of “Wow, we’re able to communicate” are exchanged. One of my favorite parts of my daughter and dogs’ shared universe is the distance the realm seems to have between itself and adult woes, a sort of backstage-during-the-play flush that childhood should be as much about as possible.