Small Standing Dance

I don't often dance except, sometimes, in my living room, around coffee cups and pillow forts. Today, I dance to delay matching socks or thickening soup. I move my body in the storm's-coming silver light flickering through the windows. Wonder if my neighbors can see me. Decide, I don't care. No. Decide, I won't care. Lost in this dialogue of muscle and air, I am interrupted by a child. The fair one. The one with eyes like limes in the ocean. The child who does not look like me. The one who would not turn around in my womb. A peach who needed to be held by her mother and no other. This child sees me dancing and reaches out both hands. Mother and daughter. Here we go round the mulberry bush. Our arms snake through the air. Hokey Pokey. Our hands in prayer. Bunny hop. Put your right foot in. We shiver when the music ends and she folds into my arms. I rock all four years of her. Wishing, as I do this small standing dance, that I could always keep her safe. Sing thunder out of the sky. Do something more than pass on this weighted standing dance, this impossible twist and shout, this quicksilver search for joy.