With rainbow sprinkles

Last night, as we cleaned house, Cleo got to choose one of three CDs for our background: on the menu were a collection Tansman guitar melodies, a Richard Thompson sampler, and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling towards Ecstasy. She chose the last, and so suddenly it was as if we were in a coffee house in mid-1994.

McLachlan's music can recede into the background - that's one of its virtues, really - but the opening lines of track 10 nevertheless caught me by surprise:

Your love, she sings, is better than ice cream
better than anything else that I've tried

Hm. I mean, pop music doesn't have to be Yeats - but, really? And, to be honest, I'm not even sure I want to go along with the premise of the comparison. Love better than ice cream? Do we really have to choose? Can't we simply enjoy our cup of chocolate, with sprinkles, even as we also love?

It turns out that we can. Tonight, after Cleo played for an hour, almost entranced, with a new Lego kit (thanks, Aunt Tasha!), we ate a modest dinner and then hit the road. Could there be a better night for a walk to the local ice cream store? I don't really think there could be. And while I realize that a blog that veers too far toward the purely celebratory is a blog that will never deserve a large readership, I can't resist. We walked; we held hands; we actually chatted. I pointed out that it's Cleo's last day as a four-year-old - an idea that seemed to strike her - and taught her the difference between a lake and a pond. She, in turn, found a long shard of bamboo and showed me how to sharpen it. We saw three rabbits, two terrapins on the bank of the river, and a pair of groundhogs. The shadows grew slightly longer. And then, soon enough, we were sharing a kiddie cup of Taharka Brothers' best.

So: better than ice cream? I dunno. Both, it turns out, are pretty good.