Wonder and Mystery

We're here in Gorgeous College Town. Curious Girl, chatty in the early morning, asks if enchanted is a bad word. No, I say, it means magical, and there could be scary magic or good magic. Oh, she tells me. "I was thinking about The Enchanted Garden and I didn't know what enchanted meant. From the story." Not quite sure what story she was thinking about, but it tickled me that she was laying there pondering vocabulary.

Onto the next subject: weather. "Is it summer here?" Why, yes. "Is it summer everywhere in the world?" No, just in the northern hemisphere. When it's summer here, it's winter in Australia and South Africa and other countries on the bottom part of the globe (with apologies to alternative map makers everywhere, she gets top/bottom better than north/south right now). "But it's summer in Where We Used to Live now." That's right, it's summer everywhere in the United States. "We are still in the United States? We are? Yay!!!!"

And she bounded happily up the stairs to find Historian Friend and kids (who clearly need pseudonyms!). Leaving me to sit here in bed and marvel at how kids make their way through the world so well, when clearly there are so very many ideas that make so little sense to them. I mean, can you imagine getting ready to move and not being sure whether you were switching countries or not (which for CG, is also all about what language people speak, which makes renewed sense of a series of questions about what words people use to say hello in Germany."