Finally (after pinning one leg down at a time with my own legs) I get both shoes on.  Shrieking with outrage, Olivia slithers off my lap onto the ground and begins unstrapping the Velcro.  I can see that more harm will be done than good if I persist, so I lean down and pop off her socks as she removes each shoe.  Seeing the new arrangement, my daughter bursts into a fresh storm of tears and thunder.

“No!  I wanneh socks!”  I touch her arm, trying to soothe, but she’s having none of that!  She jumps up and runs about five yards into the open with her white/pink head tilted back before plopping back down in the grass.

Frustration, in an unusual tag-team with Pity, holds me to the bench.  I open my book, and my girl quickly calms down on her own.  Samuel has found important things to do in the sandbox, and the first time I look up from my Walter Mosely book Olivia is holding her toes and feeling the grass on her feet.

I dip back into my book and resurface to see her walking the perimeter of the sandbox.  She concentrates on the lumps of sand bulging up between her toes, and I think that this is it; the turning point.  She will have peace and this will be the slice of life that I will write about in a day or two.  I stare at the pages of the story of Socrates Fortlow, but I’m really composing the start of this story in my mind.

I’ve just cobbled together a strong first sentence when it is blown out of my mind by Olivia’s renewed shrieks.  She wants the big yellow truck, but Sam was playing with the big yellow truck.  He offers her a smaller blue-green truck, but she will not be placated.  The blue-green plastic tumbles across the grass.

I pick up my bellowing girl, named for offerings of peace.  She stops almost immediately, and snuggles into my chest.  I sit on the bench with Olivia in one hand and “The Right Mistake” in the other.  We seem to have come full circle minus her socks and plus my book.  Her eyes are open, and her face is smoothed over with relief.  Everything seems quieter and stiller than even before I woke her.  I hit a line break in my story, and put the book down.  I reach into my backpack and take out an apple.  The hollow crunch of my bite gets Olivia’s attention for a moment.

“Want an apple?”  She only nods in response.  She takes the new apple I give her from the backpack.  She holds it against her chest, staring at one of the protected old giant trees; taking no bites.

I crunch and chew and watch my son and hold my daughter.  I pull a deep breath in through my nose and Sam sprints off (as Olivia will too, sooner or later) to the climbing tree, the big yellow truck forgotten by all.