Thursday's Child

Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

I have never liked to take naps. Strange, since I am in favor of many other forms of escape.

Dolly utilized all her persuasive charms to lure me to bed (she was most definitely in favor of naps), but as a pre-schooler I would not have it. Atop her mountainous bed, while her arms circled, hypnotic, sweet cooing, lovely song, caressing my eyebrows, softly whispering, I wiggled. Eyes wide open, I edged slowly away as Dolly drifted in and out of sleep herself, all her fairy dust squandered.

There was a little girl
With a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
When she was good
She was very very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid

The blonde bed with matching chest of drawers, dour curtains, thin worn brown rug and sparse surroundings changed shape as I floated to the ceiling. Cracks in the plaster meandered out, toward other rooms, through the green clapboard porch that Dolly painted herself, past spiders and carcasses of honey bees, out screened windows into the world of backyard. Marigolds by the porch, planted by Dolly on her knees in a house dress, grew in time-lapse lurches and I smelled their spicy orangeness.

The sky was yellow and I walked lightly on warm green grass, with the past already behind me and little dirt paths before me, which wound through shaded backyards with perennial gardens, pools of distant sunlight and other uncharted and unknown places.

This is why, to this day, I have never liked naps.