Wild Girl fell down the stairs yesterday. Like a little sack of potatoes. Thump. Thump. Bump. I didn't feel that sick panicky thing where your heart stops and you feel like you might throw up. I knew she was okay. Perhaps we're connected that deeply, I can tell what she's feeling without looking at her. Oh she was scared though. But I mean okay in the physcial sense. Not even one bruise on her little body.

But I felt like a bad mother. Her little legs turn in and while graceful she stumbles a lot, loses her balance, crashes down to the floor while walking at least once a day.

I thought I had a moment to run after another thing and then run back to her. I was away from her ten seconds and I heard the tumbling.

I held her against me curled up like a kitten, shaking like a leave, shaking like I shook when I fell down the stairs when I was pregnant with her.

That was at my parents' house. I was eight months pregnant, slipped down the stairs and twisted my ankle underneath me. The pain! Man! It was as bad as being in labor, towards the end when you feel like you're dying. Like God is crushing you under his foot. So I was shaking like a leaf myself then. I wonder if she felt it, inside me.

When I was pregnant with her, I never felt her move. Well, once a day. Sometimes a little bit at night. It was as thought she were perfectly still inside of me, listening to me think, or just waiting, holding her own breath, wondering what was going on. I poked and prodded by belly, drank tea, ate chocolate, all to try to get her to kick around. But she lay still.

So when I went down the stairs my parents hovered over me, my dad drunk as a skunk because it was night, they got me onto the living room sofa and I shook. They turned up the heat and covered me with a blanket. I kept asking if my leg was broken because it sure felt like it was. They said I was in shock. I said, If I'm in shock why am I talking. But I was fine.

And so was she.

This morning we went to the grocery. Yippee. What a treat for the little ones! Wild Girl has always loved the grocery store, the colors and brightness, soaking it all up, the people passing back and forth punctuated by those ooing and ahhing checkout ladies. Who look like they hate their job till she swings by in the cart. "Good night!" she tells them as we're leaving.

If I could pick one of them to be stranded with on a deserted island, it would be her. I love them all like mad, but if I had to pick one to live on a lonely patch of land, it would be her, because she opens up a world like twenty people would, that is the magnitude of her presence.

Hey, come to think of it, I am stuck on an island with her. But we're not alone here.