“I’ve seen a total eclipse before,” Silky says.

     Having received our glasses to view the upcoming solar phenomena, Bobo, Harley, Peter Pan, Silky and me, walked to the top of High Hill, to see what the World and bumblebees would look like through them. There we sat. In a line. Silky on one end, I on the other, and the boys in between. 
     “It was positively wonderful,” Silky went on to say about the eclipse that she alleged to have seen. 
     The four of us boys turned to Silky in unison; brows raised high above are darkened glasses. 
     Silky was looking straight upward at what appeared to be a buzzard circling in the cloudless sky. 
     “Silky,” I said. “You aren’t even old enough to have seen snow." 
     Silky’s head snapped around so quickly her Eclipse glasses came loose from one perked ear and were left dangling from the other. The boys flinched. 
      “Snow?” Silky asked. “What’s Snow?”
      Bobo, Harley and Peter Pan turned from Silky to me. 
     I, of course, rubbed my chin. 
     “Snow,” I said, as if it were common knowledge, “is ice cream that falls from the sky.” 
     Oh how Silky’s eyes widened. Her glasses dropped to the grass, unnoticed, and I went on. 
     “It falls and falls and falls, until, on perfect days, the whole wide world is covered in great, white, pillowy heaps of it, deeper, even, than Bobo is tall.” 
      Not even a gasp of astonishment came from Silky’s wide open mouth, so dumbfounded was she by the thought of what I had just described. 
       The boys turned their gaze silently back to the sky, possibly to search for the lone buzzard, or possibly to enjoy the quiet for the moment it might last, or perhaps to stand, in their own minds, knee-deep in ice cream, a thought that could never, ever, be eclipsed. 

One by one Silky is unearthing Peter Pan's plethora of buried treasures ... treats ... soil softened and delectable now, somehow, beyond even dog words.








        

If Peter Pan gets six hiccups, Silky has twenty-six. It's just that way with Silky and hiccups and stuff.




  

Silky has started a bug collection. In her stomach. Along with the bark she skinned from a table leg, the bruised and blackened half of an apple, the hindquarters of something small and dead,  half a roll of paper towels, a potty pad, an assortment of squeakers and a great deal of mole-flavored dirt, "For the bugs to play in," she says. 

The big dogs are sleeping. Silky goes first to one, and then the other, stretching out on the floor to lay nose to nose until they grumble, like old thunder, far off and benign.

  

“Who is this?” Silky asks.

     It was Silky’s turn to choose a bedtime story.

    On the cover of the book Silky found stands a befreckled girl, hands poised defiantly on her hips and orange-red braids sticking nearly straight out from either side of her head. She wears a broad, mischievous grin, a monkey on her shoulder, and enormous black and dilapidated shoes on her feet, that may or may not have once belonged to a Pirate.

     “This,” I tell Silky, “is a most adventuresome girl, to whom the rules of man have never managed to apply themselves.” 

     “What does that mean?” Silky asks.

    “It means, little angel, that she is a great deal like you."

      Silky's eyes widen. She's terribly fond of herself and anything like her. 

     "This one then," Silky says of the book, and off we go to bed. 

     I suspect we'll be adding Longstockings to someone's name soon.  

You know those fidgety, distractable children in school, who don't seem to be learning anything at all, until they're tested, and then they end up being super geniuses and stuff, knowing everything that was taught to them and more? I think Silky Joe is one of those children.