april showers

Sky asked me last night as I washed her hair: Do you know what my favorite two parts of your body are? and I thought, uh-oh. Is this going to be like the time Wyatt asked my sister what those two round lumps on her chest were, and then added, because my mom doesn't have those? And then Sky told me - your arms and your mouth, so you can hug and kiss me. Sometimes on a shitty day in the middle of a shitty week, that girl is all I need. In a separate, clothed conversation, when asked what her earliest memory was, she replied, you know, that day we walked down Waikiki to visit Uncle Rabbit. You mean three days ago? Yes, that is my earliest memory. So on the plus side, nothing I say could possibly be scarring her for life.

There are hard changes and challenges afoot this week. I'm wading my way through the crap, and suddenly all the other things, the ones I thought I could count on, fell apart. My foot, for one. I have a pain in my heel that's difficult to even walk on - it started at the race on saturday, perhaps all that barefoot sand running was too much. So no running for a while, until I can walk again, anyway, and I should probably lay off the giant hooker heels at work. Not running is not good for my brain. And then I was reminded that sometimes, when you're down, people do shitty things to you. Friends are judging me, or not showing up on me, and I'm wasting energy on anger over little crap like busybody-ing that I should just ignore. But that's easier said than done, because I am, after all, my mother's daughter. And when you're bad to Lucy, you get a seat on her plane. Permanently. My swimming teacher from the second grade is still on that plane. But the plane is a story for another day.

Yesterday afternoon, Katherine and I went for a swim at Ala Moana. Mucky, nasty Ala Moana Beach Park had the clearest water I have ever seen there. Usually it's difficult to see my hand in front of my face, but today you could see the bottom. We swim there in spite of the ick because it's convenient, and because there are 500 m markers that we use for intervals. We warmed up 500, then started off on our first interval. I was able to hang side by side with K for the first couple 100, but then she pulled ahead, so I hopped on her feet, figuring it's got to be akin to motorpacing somehow. With about 100m to go, I hit her feet. She had stopped. But before I could catch my breath she started up again. I figured she hit some seaweed and forgot about it. Until we were out of the water a two intervals and a cool down later, and she told me that she stopped because of the very large shadow that swam by underneath us. It was too big to be anything but a good-sized shark. Lucky for us, he wasn't hungry! Lucky for me, I was too busy trying to breathe to see it.. because I probably would have gotten out and run back along the beach on my bum foot, injuring myself further. I've seen many, many sharks while scuba diving, but only two that ever scared me. A galapagos chased me out of the water in high school, and a large sandbar shark behaving oddly freaked me out off of Barber's Point a few years ago. But something about being on the surface makes them so much scarier..