tuesday, twenty july: father of swords
I am not sure how it happens, but I’m sitting here at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning, middle of the summer, my only real responsibility today is to go to the lake with my adorable child, and somehow I’m feeling time-pressure anxiety. Like, honest to god, I opened this page and thought, I don’t have time for this today. My brain, not helpful.
Today’s card is the Father of Swords. The guidebook describes him as fair, analytical, able to remove his emotions from a situation and see it objectively. “He’s a responsible man with deep ties to his family.” The card depicts him as an owl holding a rainbow sword. I like the owl.
We had a tragic owl death in last night’s bedtime reading. We’ve been reading the Redwall books to Declan at bedtime for, god, years at this point. There are an infinite number of Redwall books. (For those who are unfamiliar, as I was before we started doing these at bedtime: it’s a fantasy series about talking woodland creatures. Heroic adventures, good fighting evil, and victories are always celebrated with lavish feasts.) The current one has some definite late-book-in-a-long-series problems; a major plot point involved trying to rescue a bratty mousebaby named Dwopple, and Matt and I both agreed that the Redwallers would be well served by letting the bad guys keep their hostage. More to the point, the plots are starting to recycle. “Rescue of a bratty mousebabe” happened a few books ago, and while the bratty mousebabe in that sequence grew up to be a Warrior of Redwall, I doubt that a mouse named Dwopple is destined for greatness in the same way. I also reset having to keep saying Dwopple.
Dwopple Dwopple Dwopple.
That said, I love the bedtime reading. Dec gets very invested in the Redwall world–I have some great pictures of him as Martin the Warrior Mouse from last Halloween–and he’ll take the books to bed and re-read the funny parts. It’s a rich enough fantasy world that he can get lost in it. (I have clocked a lot of time answering variations on “if Redwall came to real life, what kind of animal would you be, and what job would you have at the Abbey?”) It’s also nice to unwind a moment at the end of the day. The reading isn’t always calming, since sometimes he jumps up to act out battle sequences, and he always gets to sing the songs or shout the battle cries, but I like the time together.