Three Grandbabies (Springstubb)

One is a stoic. Yesterday, when I suggested taking a walk to the park, she sighed. “It’s probably closed,” she said. “Because of the virus.”

She actually pronounced it “viwuss,” making Covid sound much cuter than it has any right to be.

Four years old, she wears her little mask with a recruit’s air of duty. She’s a first child, used to shouldering expectations. She tries to please us adults, but she also works hard to understand the world she finds herself in. That world already had so many rules-- the first two words she learned to read were NO and STOP. Now, add in all the closures, the next-door friends glimpsed only through the hedge, the relentless hand sanitizing (this she actually enjoys). Her parents gave her a picture book on the very big world of really tiny microbes, and I watch her pore over it, frowning and fascinated.

She doesn’t seem scared of the virus, any more than she is of death, though she knows what that is, too. “You don’t get up,” she says matter-of-factly. A succinct definition.

Her two-year-old sister screams bloody murder if you try to put a mask on her. No thinking is involved, only instinct and rage. When you are four and the adult world presents, yet again, something new and bewildering, you try, at least a little, to prove you’re big enough to handle it. But when you’re two, all you know is what you want, and a piece of cloth over your face does not make the list.

In the beginning, months went by without seeing these girls, and then, when we were finally allowed to visit, their parents laid down rules: only outside, only at a distance. The minute we stepped into their backyard, the two-year old came running, lassoing my knees with her arms. The four-year-old hesitated a few seconds, then did the same. We all pretended to be helpless to stop them. A win for the rule breaker!

Their baby brother was born in early August. A pandemic baby, healthy and jolly as can be. A masked face bending over his cradle is normal to him, and I wonder if he will grow up with some extra-keen ability to read the expression in people’s eyes, to fathom their true thoughts and feelings from the crook of a brow, the crinkle of an eyelid. Everyone around him speculates on what the future will be like-- which things will return, what we’ve lost forever, whether we’ll ever again crowd into classrooms, restaurants, theaters, friends’ homes, all the places where human-ness happens. Will we hug when we meet? Will we trust the very air? Our new grandbaby will never know how things used to be. This seems wonderful to me. He’ll never compare, never mourn. He’ll live in the world he was born to, looking forward not back. All is unknown, untried, beckoning, begging him to explore.

Some days I’ve behaved like the four-year-old, trying to accept and to be mature, and others I’ve raged like the furious two-year old. What I want to do now is watch the newborn. Watch him discover his hands, find his voice, smile into our eyes. Here is the world. Let me step back and see how he makes it his.

Tricia Springstubb is the author of short fiction and essays for adults and more than a dozen picture books and novels for young readers. More about her work is at triciaspringstubb.com She lives in Cleveland Heights.