Trekhprudny Lane

Gorgeous morning, and our first taste of zolotaya osyen this year. Though at street level it is still as cool and blue-gray as dawn, the very tops of the apartment blocs are lit up, their windows blazing. The penthouse residents alone can see something golden just over the horizon. Which works, I suppose, as a metaphor for the New Russia. But it's too early in the morning for that.

The mosquitoes are so bad in these final weeks of warmish weather that I've pulled out the copious bed net I bought for Wisconsin, strung it up from a ceiling lamp, and we're sleeping rather romantically under its draping veils. And we have screens on the windows. Strange. The cleaning lady scoffs at my poetic solution -- though the net is legit, from a camping website, not for god's sake Pier One! -- she stands by something called Fumitox, which I hesitate to bring into this apartment. If it's tox for them, it's tox for us, I speculated yesterday, but Ludmila rolled her eyes.

One week ago today, at our little farmhouse rental in Sweden, EB stacked a child's chair onto a coffee table, climbed to the top, and fell immediately onto the tile floor, landing on her shoulder. She didn't react much at the time, but she's been complaining intermittently of pain ever since, putting on shirts and dresses has been a struggle, and she's been reluctant to use her right arm while playing. I took her to see the pediatrician Monday, who briefly checked her arm's range of movement, shrugged it off, and sent us home with a signed and sealed good health certificate for the start of school. (At least half of the parents of children in EB's class purchased their spravki rather cheaply from a lady at the far end of one of the subway lines; no need to show up with your child for an exam that way. We would have done this... so glad we didn't.) Yesterday the bump at her little clavicle was unmistakable, and we rushed back to the clinic where I insisted on an X-ray, and sure enough, the poor mite has a fractured collarbone, and has to wear a brace for two weeks. I lay in bed last night remembering how I urged her to wear her own backpack through the airport... ahhhhhh, terrible mother!