roses are red

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

This is how another little interaction with X jumped to the fore on Saturday afternoon. As we were standing on our front porch and thinking about making a dash through the torrential downpour from the remnants of Hanna, X recites this motto perfectly as she curses our yet-to-arrive postman. The reason I call it a curse is because she was waiting – on day three of the wait – for a check to arrive in the post. The lack of a postman provided the opportunity and Hanna provided for use of the motto. What I found so, dare I say comical, about her recitation was that it took me a few minutes to realize that she’d actually delivered the entire thing verbatim. If I’d tried to make my distaste for rain and mail known I would have said something like “You know, rain, sleet…all that stuff. Where’s my mail?” because I don’t actually know the entire song. To get an idea of why something like this is so strange yet so familiar, you need to know that there’ve been hundreds of times she’s turned to me and said things like…

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.”

“Oh…who said that? It’s a rondeau, you know….a rondeau….who was it?”

To which I always reply, “What’s a rondeau?”

She has a mind that’s latched onto just about every bit of poetry-like text she’s ever read and it often bubbles to the surface when she’s doing something like…curling her hair. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no poetry knowledge; I’ve tried because it seems something I should know but it never sticks. In fact, I don’t think I could recite even one poem if you offered me $100.

Of course, when we were at the Post Office about thirty minutes later she was suddenly looking about claiming “it should be posted somewhere in here….” I’d completely forgotten the postal creed by then so I wasn’t too sure what she was on about: posted? what? where? As she dodged between rows of postal boxes, looking along the walls and columns, I thought she’d gone mad. In truth, I thought she was looking for something posted about umbrella rules since I was, at that very moment, gathering up my umbrella and readying for our exodus into the swale. Umbrella rules? Right.