Red turtle swimming into the deep blue sea
I have now been swabbed three times for COVID-19 and enjoyed none of them, but thanks to the most recent one I was able to spend the day with my niece. Tomorrow she is attending a birthday party on her mother's side of the family, so we will not see her for some time after that.
I want to take her to the ocean. She's so ready to swim, it's like watching a young sea turtle. She spent the entire afternoon in the wading pool in my parents' back yard, flutter-kicking or dolphin-kicking which I know she has never been taught—the difference, she told me knowledgeably, between how humans and merfolk swim. She pushed her shoulders restlessly against the blue plastic sides of the pool and complained, "I need gills! I can't breathe!" It is an article of faith with her that a mermaid has fins in the water and feet on land. She didn't get it from Splash (1984); although she has a friend named Madison, she'd never heard of the movie that made a girl's name out of a street sign. It's on Disney+, so I showed her two scenes from it: Madison swimming down through reefs of deep water to the shipwreck where the billowing old charts show her how to find New York, Madison running a bath by night, her brilliant gold-and-orange tail unfurling into the salted water. She talked through both of them in the way that means she's paying attention. (And Disney appears to have censored the streaming version for the extremely mild nudity of Madison originally ashore, which means we will watch the rest of it sometime off my DVD, because I don't want to support that nonsense.) I also showed her the pictures and video from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
asakiyume's three-part interview with stillwater_fx, because she was enraptured by the idea of having her own tail. "The only color," she said almost scornfully what I asked what color her scales were. "Purple." I know she's been to the sea before, but she's never been taught to swim. I don't think it would take much more than holding her in the waves until she got the hang of floating and then making sure she didn't disappear immediately out to sea. She learned to ride her bike without training wheels in less than an hour this week. I don't know when I'll get the chance. The beaches seem terribly crowded. I want my niece to stay safe. I want an island.
What I have instead, because my mother heard about it on NPR and thought I would enjoy it, is a hardcover of Patrice Caldwell's A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope (2020), from which I immediately read Alaya Dawn Johnson's "The Rules of the Land," which turned out to involve the mythology of Yemaya and Olokun. That was satisfyingly thematic and the rest of the anthology looks equally excellent.
I'd still like to sleep sometime, though.
I want to take her to the ocean. She's so ready to swim, it's like watching a young sea turtle. She spent the entire afternoon in the wading pool in my parents' back yard, flutter-kicking or dolphin-kicking which I know she has never been taught—the difference, she told me knowledgeably, between how humans and merfolk swim. She pushed her shoulders restlessly against the blue plastic sides of the pool and complained, "I need gills! I can't breathe!" It is an article of faith with her that a mermaid has fins in the water and feet on land. She didn't get it from Splash (1984); although she has a friend named Madison, she'd never heard of the movie that made a girl's name out of a street sign. It's on Disney+, so I showed her two scenes from it: Madison swimming down through reefs of deep water to the shipwreck where the billowing old charts show her how to find New York, Madison running a bath by night, her brilliant gold-and-orange tail unfurling into the salted water. She talked through both of them in the way that means she's paying attention. (And Disney appears to have censored the streaming version for the extremely mild nudity of Madison originally ashore, which means we will watch the rest of it sometime off my DVD, because I don't want to support that nonsense.) I also showed her the pictures and video from
asakiyume's three-part interview with stillwater_fx, because she was enraptured by the idea of having her own tail. "The only color," she said almost scornfully what I asked what color her scales were. "Purple." I know she's been to the sea before, but she's never been taught to swim. I don't think it would take much more than holding her in the waves until she got the hang of floating and then making sure she didn't disappear immediately out to sea. She learned to ride her bike without training wheels in less than an hour this week. I don't know when I'll get the chance. The beaches seem terribly crowded. I want my niece to stay safe. I want an island.What I have instead, because my mother heard about it on NPR and thought I would enjoy it, is a hardcover of Patrice Caldwell's A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope (2020), from which I immediately read Alaya Dawn Johnson's "The Rules of the Land," which turned out to involve the mythology of Yemaya and Olokun. That was satisfyingly thematic and the rest of the anthology looks equally excellent.
I'd still like to sleep sometime, though.
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*hugs*
Nine
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I knew she loved Ponyo (2008), but I had no idea she felt so strongly about mermaids. She feels very strongly. She said my hair looked like seaweed and tangled herself in it. She also had me read a wonderful picture book called The Snail and the Whale (2003), by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, which I had never heard of and was charmed by. This is a terrible, terrible summer not to be able to take her to the sea.
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I know he's not taking orders right now, but I hope on the other side of this pandemic (I want there to be another side) he will be, because I wouldn't want to commission a tail from anyone else for her.
She sounds like a natural.
She couldn't have water on her face for such a long time and now all of a sudden she's ducking her head under the surface of the pool and coming up with her hair streaming all over her face, so that I told her it looked like seaweed itself. It makes me so happy and so frustrated right now.
[edit] I forgot to mention in the post that I played the conch for her! She said mermaids communicate across distances by slapping the water with their tails. I agreed with her, but said that conch shells can be used as well. She'd never heard one, so I went and got ours from beside the fireplace and made it boom. It's a queen conch shell that my father thinks was turned into a trumpet by my youngest uncle. It doesn't have a mouthpiece, just the end of the whorl cut off. We always blew it for New Year's. It was my responsibility. My neighbors probably hate us now, but my niece loved it.
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I hope you get the opportunity very soon. *hugs*
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In the kinds of stories I write, sure!
(It makes me happy.)
I hope you get the opportunity very soon.
Thank you.
*hugs*
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I like the idea of loon-sounding lake mermaids.
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That anthology looks great.
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She's wonderful.
That anthology looks great.
Because I am currently under a rock as regards all forms of art that I don't randomly stumble across, I had no idea it even existed. And I really approve!
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I really recommend having one around the house.
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Thank you! I will. I would like it. At the moment I just feel very flattened.
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*hugs*
I so hope you get to teach your niece to swim, and soon.
Thank you.
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Six. She will be seven in the winter.