April 9th, 2025

Yali comes back to our room early that morning... does “the worm” across our bed towards Oxbear... “Dad. Can you print me a machete?”

Up up up... again again... weather app advertising flurries that never come...

Several hours later back at the old school sorting homework packets... before we leave the Spanish teacher consults with Patience on lesson plans for the following week while she's in "some place that sounds like Mexico but isn't" Patience explains later... my nine year-old is somehow both nine and also thirty...

Bookwork completed for the day by early afternoon... Yali is off climbing trees and swinging a step ladder in circles around the yard under gray-light skies and spring breezes...

And Patience is working through her daily tally of 420 questions... “Hold your horses, Patience...” // “I don't have horses. I only have one horse”...

Puck walks out with the storage pack he always wears across his chest now when he goes out... he continues to modify it, this time attaching a sunglasses case with black zip ties and black electrical tape before he leaves for work...

Patience and I return later that evening from an hour at the studio as Oxbear and Yali leave for Cub Scouts to hear about politics from the former mayor of Ferguson... and to play Sharks & Minnows...

Homemade cheeseburgers for myself and Patience while she shares with me how she plans to one day name her kids Violet and Otto...

Rich blue of unfallen rain in the southwest... birdsong...