ode

I knelt on the sidewalk this morning and hugged Hank tight, long enough for my heart to feel the courage coursing through his. I looked into his mud puddle eyes and tried hard to close the circuit, kissed the palm of his hand and promised a chocolate chip cookie at pick up. I love you, I whispered, gently tying the sentence to his ear, double checking the knot. I watched him walk away from the corner with the rest of the small group, clutching the sawtooth acorn cap reminiscent of his own wild hair.

His default answer is Yes, his default attitude Let's go, he gets that from his dad. 

But there's something about the sudden idea of school for thirteen years combined with the dread of more rhyming words today. 

He loves everything about kindergarten - his teacher most of all, but also his classmates and the cafeteria, art projects and music and stem stations and quiet time, but the brief phonemic work of rhyming seems to send him into fits of existential arithmetic. The teacher has called me and the principal has distracted him, he's been allowed to read poems to the class or read books to himself instead. He'll get through this, likely just a blip on the radar, but Oh! his aches will always be mine.