“What if the sky was red?” Molly asks.

“Like blood?”

She twists her face as though she’s just tasted a lemon. Or a dill pickle. “I was thinking more like a flower.”

“Ah,” I say, squinting my eyes against the gooey warm light of the honeyed summer sun. It’s only 9am and it’s gotta be close to 85 degrees already. “Like a rose then?” 

She nods vigorously, wiping away a few strands of hair that hang limp on her brown freckled face.

“Maybe it is,” I say. 

“It’s not,” she responds with that brand of certainty possessed only by people under the age of six. And sociopaths. “Look at it. It’s BLUE.”

“Is it though?” I say, leaning back against the tree under which we decided to have our picnic breakfast. (Her idea.)

She stares at me, then rolls her eyes. “You’re just being silly. It’s blue.”

“But what if what I see as red is what you see as blue?”

This gives her pause. She picks a blade of grass and studies it intently. She gazes back up at me. “No.”

I’m surprised at this response. She usually entertains whimsy. Welcomes it into her arms like a gaggle of puppies.

“No?”

She shakes her head with the same vigor with which she nodded it previously. Several strands stick again to her sweaty cheeks. She wipes them away as a cicada begins its song in a neighboring tree. It’s a brand of music that always leaves me a little on edge. 

“Just like that, huh? Just plain no?” 

“Yep,” she sighs. “Because it doesn’t make sense.”

“That I might see blue where you see red?”

“Not unless your eyes are broken.”

“Or yours are,” I counter.

She laughs. “My eyes can’t be broken because my eyes are new,” she crosses them and points to them, “and yours are ooooooooold.”

I cock a brow and give her half a smile. Then I pick a blade of grass and study it as she did. “What do you see when you look at a blade of grass?”

“Huh?” she looks at me with an expression I don’t recognize.

“You were looking at a blade of grass before,” I say. “What did you see?”

“Why? Do you think it’s purple or something?”

I shake my head. “I think it’s green.”

“Good.”

“At least my version of green,” I add. She lets out an exasperated sigh. “But just stick with me a second. What did you see?”

“I saw a piece of grass.”

“Okay. Now, what if you were a ladybug on the blade of grass. What would you see?”

She shrugs. “How am I supposed to know? I’m not a ladybug, am I?”

“You are not,” I confirm. “But do you think a ladybug sees the same thing that you do?”

“No,” she says definitively, picking at her favorite muffin we grabbed at the café on the way here. A crumb falls to the earth. An ant scurries by my left foot and I suspect that he or she is heading to its brethren to report the presence of baked goods so they can organize.  

“So what do you think then?”

“I think this is stupid,” she says and tosses a piece of the muffin off to her right. An aggressive blue jay (a redundancy, I know) swoops down from the deep green canopy of a catalpa tree and snatches it with a victorious war cry; as if to mock everyone else who missed the opportunity.

“I think,” I offer, not that she asked, “that the ladybug sees a long smooth runway that it can take flight from. Like an airplane.”

“Okay,” Molly looks up at the sky. “And is it green?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know how a ladybug sees.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s what I said.”

It’s not what she said though. Not exactly.

“I’m bored and I’m hot,” Molly says through a yawn, which I try not to find annoying – given that it was her idea to come to the park on this sticky morning.

“Okay. So what do you want to do then?” I ask. She’s obviously not into our ‘what if’ game today. I smile thinking about some of the scenarios that have spilled so effortlessly from her imagination over the past two years during our times here. And I try to tell myself that it’s just the heat getting to her today because I don’t want to admit that we’re heading down a certain path. One that I recognize as I’ve traveled it twice before.

“I want to go home. There’s nothing to do,” she whines. Molly tosses the rest of her uneaten muffin into the baseball field and watches it get devoured by a mass of squawking seagulls who are easily twenty miles from the closest body of water. I catch a fleeting little girl delight in her smile and her eyes. It quickly fades.

“You don’t want to go over to the pond and see if the tadpoles have grown? Turned into big old gnarly bullfrogs?” I laugh.

She smiles and ponders this for a moment, but then responds with a rather uncommitted, “Not really,” as though she’s trying it on for size. 

I nod. “Okay. We can go home,” I say with some resignation. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“I do,” she says, standing up.

I don’t know if she picks up on my disappointment. It was not my intention, but she’s always been more empathic than her brothers. She comes over and nudges me gently on the arm. “So…” she begins.

I look at her quizzically. “So…?” I respond.

“So, what if the sky was red?” she repeats, pointing to the sky, trailing a half circle with her finger. “All the way acrost?” My heart stirs at the mispronunciation of the word – which I don’t dare correct. Life and the inevitable shedding of childhood will see to that.