Spain Dad, a baby blog

I collapsed on the couch. I had been unpacking boxes all morning. The stack of cardboard by the front door was my witness, and Alleke, who had stood by my side watching. To her, I was the magician, pulling things from our old house out of a box.

From the couch, I could see the moon. It was a strange thing to see the moon caught there between the window frame and the roof line in the middle of the afternoon.

Alleke climbed up on the couch next to me. I pointed, and she saw the moon too. We sat there side-by-side with our heads back, like we were in dentist chairs, and looked up at the white dot in the sky.

Later, when Alleke was in footie pajamas, and we sat reading stories in the rocking chair in her bedroom, she wanted to read the blue book with the moon on the front of it. She pointed at the moon on every page. I found another book with a moon in it, and she pointed at the moon in that book too, each time looking up at me to make sure I saw it as well.

There it was, the moon.

Over the course of the next few days while I carried Alleke around the city on my back, I would catch her leaning way back in the baby carrier looking for the moon, and sometimes she would find it.

I wondered if Alleke’s obsession with the moon had to do with simple fact that it always came back. If she kept looking, eventually she would find it again. The moon was one of the few things in her life, besides her mom and dad, that was usually the same and usually there. The moon was her reference point.

I grew up on the rim of the horizon, on a small acreage on a gravel road in Iowa. There were some things that never changed, like the sky over me and the dirt under my feet.

Alleke, on the other hand, is growing up in the city, a place that reinvents itself constantly. Nothing seems certain or eternal. One building goes up, another comes down. Friendships come and go, jobs change, and we move around. We filter out strangers and street noise and try to ground ourselves somewhere, being intentional about seeing the same people and going the same places, because it doesn’t happen naturally–not here.

Maybe that’s why when Alleke is looking for something she knows, she looks up.

We fly to the US this week, and we will be there for a few weeks. Once again, everything will change for Alleke–that is, except for her mom, her dad…and the moon.