Today at lunch, India said, "Momma, what's a secret code?"
I told her that it's when you want to tell someone something without anyone else understanding. "Like, if I want to tell you, 'I Love you,' but I want to keep it a secret, I could say, 'India, blueberry punch,' and that would mean, 'I love you.'"
We blueberry punched each other all day.

And I got to thinking.

Mostly about how all our communicating is code and how no one knows how to crack it. Ya, we all have our theories, but our pencils have been scratched down to stubs and the sun is about to rise on our pages of indiscernible text. Words have failed us terribly.
Was there a moment, I wonder, in the beginning, when those hunched back, hairy, sub-humans, first declared that this noise, meant "Me" and that noise meant "You", that we could go back to, and define as the moment language was born? Could we have chosen something else? Maybe if we only ever used our hands to communicate, we could have kept a handle on language. Maybe, if our "words" were the different ways we touched each other, keeping ideas solid and warm, requiring another body to exist, we wouldn't loose each other in all the fancy ways we try to hide ourselves in.

The older I become, the bigger the wordless part of me, becomes. I used to have so many words for God. I had ten thousand for love. Encyclopedias worth for pain and hope. Now, I have all these round, smooth, spaces, full of knowledge, but wordless.

If I could speak to you wordlessly, with only my hands , I would take an hour to say, "Today was hard, but I'm trying to hold on."
I would pray with you by washing your hair and rubbing your feet.
I would show you my hurt by not moving for an entire week.
I would tell you "blueberry punch" by tickling you in the guts to make you laugh; by kissing your palms.