The girls see the truck as a kind of play house now. They stand on the seat, twist the wheel and go through the contents of my key tray faster than a vacuum cleaner. Her sister is still teething so she mostly chews on the mike instead of summoning aid. They greatly delight in taking apart the socket sets and tool boxes tucked under the seat. And all the while milk dribbles over the papers and maps, and cookie crumbs work their way down into the ribs and vents of the radios.
Girls bring their own order into the world.
It is not like our male order of grids and lines and charts and boxes. With them there is always the sense that the world does fit together, that everything has a place and will eventually find itself even it you won't be able to cast a grid over it or make an outline of it or put it in a box. We don't finally know a river when we have named all its parts and have plotted them on a map. True knowing, knowing as understanding, cannot be plotted and woe to the angler or ecologist who would comprehend a river in a system. Lately I have been reading James Gleick's book Chaos.