Dear Lucy,

Saturday, we watched your brother play a late soccer game. He wasn’t getting much action on defense, but he looked tough in his red uniform. You were ripping up grass by the handful, tossing it into the air, and screaming “It’s Raining!” I smiled at the notion of grass in the air and the way you’ve turned my world upside-down.

We watched the sun dip into the mountains behind your brother playing defense. There’s a moment, right at the sun’s vanishing point, when the mountains are topped with a thin layer of orange—it looks like they’re on fire. And the sky just above is a purple—you love the purple part—that fades into a deep, deep blue before it turns into the black star speckled sky. If it was a painting, there would’ve been a coyote howling at a yellow crescent.

I said “Look at the pretty mountains, Sweet Face. See the orange? See the purple?” and you settled into a contemplative gaze. I watched you looking. I wondered what you were wondering. You stood up, took a couple steps toward the mountains, and stopped at the soccer field’s edge.

It was in the midst of this pensive appreciation of the desert night that you screamed “I AM GOING TO EAT THE MOUNTAINS!” and stormed the soccer field. In a mad ensemble of pink and purple (with many striped tights) you streaked across the field of your brother’s AYSO sanctioned soccer game proclaiming your aim to eat mountains.


The officials grimaced. Jackson searched for a hole. All the parents snickered. And I heard the opening strains of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s cover of Hendrix’s Voodoo Child explode into a guitar that knew no limits.

Lucy. There will come a night when the phone rings for me to bail you out of jail and I will probably be angry. I will drive to the jail and mull over the possibility of smoking cigarettes again. But I hope that I’ll be able to remember the day you stormed a soccer field to devour the horizon. Because on that day your rebellion made me smile. You reminded me that I am truly inside your bones, testing the limits of what can be done. You’ve made it clear that you’ve come into our world with the intention of listening to no one. I have my share of respect for this stance, though I suspect it’s the source of my salty hair.

Plus it’s such a rough, lonely road. The sun is so hot, little girl. Mind your tiny wings.

Before I take you home we will park the car at the airport, get out, and watch airplanes take off through the chain link fence. Maybe I’ll mooch a cigarette off you if you don’t tell your Mom. You can tell me how you wound up in jail. And struggle to articulate why you do such crazy shit. Though neither of us will ever really know.

Maybe we’ll even talk until the sun rises. We can eat mountains for breakfast in a storm of raining grass.