Lia is making me very emotional tonight.
To answer the question, “Where is Papa?” I had to say, “Papa is not here. You know he doesn’t live in Lolo’s house. Papa lives in Papa’s house.”
While hanging out in the balcony, where she chose to join me after seeing me sitting in the dark on a little step and after putting on her favorite pair of shoes from the shoe rack that now holds almost all of her shoes and almost ALL of mine, she looked up at the sky, held her arms over her head and said, “It’s raining on a starry night.”
Looking at her shoes, and remembering mine, I am reminded of what her Papa said this morning, as he was packing my shoes in a big box, “You’re bringing all of these shoes? Now, you don’t have any shoes here.” I said I still have about six to eight pairs of footwear in the shoe rack. He said, “But these are the shoes that you don’t wear anymore.”
Lia went up to me, holding a little doll dressed in pink that she found in my sister’s bedroom’s display cabinet and that she fondly calls Princess, asking me, “Where are her shoes?” I said, “I don’t know. She doesn’t have any shoes.” Then she picked up another doll, a doll from my childhood, a United Nations costume doll from Denmark, and looked at its feet. Seeing that the Danish doll is also barefoot, she told me, “Her shoes are also missing.”
A few minutes later, she came back to me, holding a little black piece of something that upon closer inspection was revealed to be a tiny shoe. “Look mama, it’s a shoe.” And she tried to fit it onto the Danish doll’s foot and lo and behold, it fit! I heard her exclaim, “Yaaan!”
Coming back to Princess and her bare feet, Lia held it up and said, “Her shoes are missing. I’ll go and find it?” To which I could only nod. Speechless.
