Lolo - Lap Nine Around The Sun
Otters hold hands while they sleep, so that the current does not carry them away from each other.
I did not know this until Lolo became a person who knows this, and now tells it to anyone who will hold still long enough. She will also tell you, if you let her, that otters have two layers of fur, the densest of any animal on earth, and that they spend an astonishing portion of their lives grooming, because they have no blubber, and warmth for an otter is a thing that must be earned every day. I have come to believe this is one of the better pieces of information a nine-year-old can walk around carrying: that some creatures stay warm, and stay together, by trying.
Lolo turned nine on April eighteenth, we celebrated at the Lowcountry Zoo in Brookgreen Gardens. We came because she loves otters and all the other soft, whiskered, strange things that Mother Nature makes. And because, when a person turns nine, you want to stand her next to the world and let her point at what interests her.
At the zoo, she met her people. A river otter swam past us with his tongue out, letting us know his dissatisfaction that we were out of sardines. A gray fox crouched in the tall grass and watched us for a long moment without blinking, and the watching went both ways. A red wolf ‚ rare enough to be nearly a rumor ‚ stood on a wooden platform and looked at us the way a myth looks at people who have come to see a myth. The roseate spoonbill, which is a pink and improbable bird with a bill like a flat spoon, stood on a fence and tolerated our adoration with great dignity. Nature, occasionally, just shows off.
The wildlife educator brought out a milk snake. While I took one small, dignified step backward, Lolo and her brother Wyatt stepped forward. Lolo reached out her finger and touched it. I've been thinking about that a lot. Nine years ago, Lolo was a person who could not hold up her own head. Now she is a person who can decide to be brave in the space of a single breath.
Between the otter and the fox, between the red wolf and the pink, improbable spoonbill, Lolo and Wyatt ran. On the path. Off the path. Onto the playground and a little into a hammock, where there was a brief moment of peace in the Lowcountry.
Wyatt is ten, nearly eleven, and performing the slow and honorable work of becoming a teenager. He spent the day orbiting his sister like a small, patient moon ‚ hugging her in front of the red-tailed hawk enclosure, and later, at the picnic table, pleasantly waiting while she opened her presents, looking at times a little over it. I watched the two of them all day. I am, for the record, not over it.
At the picnic table Lolo opened her presents. She laughed so hard at a pair of tiny earrings, now allowed, her ears being, as of very recently, freshly pierced, that she put her whole hand on her forehead. She hugged a stuffed sea turtle roughly her own size. At Aquino's the chef built a volcano out of an onion, and the whole table marveled at the flame, flinched from it, and then laughed at ourselves for flinching. Lolo wore a birthday girl tiara. Aunt Elle stacked a second round of presents in front of her until she could barely see over them.
Lolo, I know nine-year-olds are not really the target audience for a message like this. You're the audience for sea otters and string cheese and running down a path for no reason. That's fine. This message isn't for the you who is nine. It's for the you who will someday be fifteen, or thirty, or fifty-one, trying to remember what it felt like to be this loved.
It felt like this. A spring day. A snake. A turtle too big to fit in the car. Me sitting a row back, watching you be braver than I was, and a whole family holding on to you, the way otters hold on to each other, so the current doesn’t carry us away.
Happy birthday, Lolo.
