LA, this behavior's gotta stop.

Oh Los Angeles, I think you are winning.
Wearing me down to a nubbin with your evil ways, your hot sunshiney desert ways.
Your hoses bleeding good clean water into green grass lawns that never meant to grow here, bleeding water into wasted puddles in the street.
Your plastic bags, your long commutes, your angry, angry drivers.
Those infinite spots of tar on every sidewalk where aborted bits of chewing gum were flung to rest and became oily black stains in the heat.
The woman who came too close with her cigarette and touched my baby's arm, asked for change, and kept her hand on Edie when I said I had none and said "Just two quarters? Emily, your mama doesn't want to help me..." (but then I grew a voice I didn't know I had and told her she needed to Let Go. Now. The situation didn't make me nervous so much as realize that I have a grizzly bear hibernating in me. Don't touch my cub with those soiled intentions.)
LA I am tired of that nicotine stained sky you call blue every day, punctuated only by the 24-hour parade of airplanes coming in to land, so close we can reach out and draw our own logos on their smooth sides. That seaweed flavored fruit roll-up spread thickly over our heads, nibbled by the jagged teeth of those raggedy palms meant to suggest some kind of paradise. That poor battered sky getting bruised by those great black oil wells, pumping their blind fists in the air without listening to reason.
LA why do you have to clutter up every moment of space with your WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS everywhere? Each place of business competes with each other in volume of printed material scraping my eyeballs as we drive by. It's not just Randy's Donuts. It's Try Randy's Bacon Double Cheeseburger. It's Drive Thru around Back. It's Gatorade and Pepsi Cola and Fried Chicken and everything on the menu has its own separate sign. As if nobody wants to talk to each other. Now I completely empathize with any citizen of this town who does not enjoy reading for pleasure. The visual assault of word upon word upon meaningless money-grubbing word makes me want to banish printed material from the house and watch something on tv that requires no reading. Better yet, hire a mime.

So I've undertaken many knitting projects. So many that nearly all of my needles are busy dreaming up futures free of entanglement. My hands need this variety of texture so they knit a row of each at a time. They stroke the rabbity tail of baby alpaca for a minute, then scrub with a no-nonsense string of American cotton, rough to the touch, before switching to the mysterious forest of wool in shades of Pine, Fir, Cedar, and Birch, all blending together soundlessly. Wordlessly, which is strangely enough just what I need right now.

Let Grammy teach the baby to say Apple. I am teaching her to sit contentedly in silence with nameless colors and feelings. Just kidding. She is a noisy little sprout of song, wildly tapping her egg shaker against the new tambourine, trying to clap and bowing her head irreverently with her hands clasped, not clapped. Grunting with the effort. Pulling book after book out of the basket by the bed, not to read, but to wave in the air and pass from one hand to the other while alternately chewing or studying the covers. How far will they go if scooted? How about thrown? Dropped? What sound will the egg shaker make if tapped on a piece of tupperware? The floor? A belly? Emily is busy. Yes Emily. Yes Edie too. Embrace the confusion, as we have.