born with it

I was crying again. He watched my pudgy white cheeks stretch thin as I wailed. What did I want?

His mother had asked him to watch me. His first niece. My mother was at work. My father was at work. My grandmother was at the market. My twelve-year-old uncle blinked through his glasses at me. I wailed again.

He tried to pick me up. I still wailed. Even louder than before, because that’s what children do when they want something and they don’t get it.

Then, he put me down. In a stroller. And started pushing me around the big, stucco, ranch-style house. Mottled brown and orange and yellow carpet. Brown and yellow and orange linoleum.

And I stopped wailing. My uncle eventually found that this was the only way to calm me down when I cried.

Common sense says I probably just found the motion soothing.

I think I was just born with a need to roam.