“Come, Mama, come see! There is a color in the bathroom!” — my daughter whirls in with a look of pure elation on her face —“Come see the color, mama, under the table!”

Well, these are rather confusing directions — in the bathroom or under the table?

My hair looks like a bird’s nest, I’ve got spiderwebs laced around my elbows and knees, I have just tossed a handful of dead bugs in the bin and what in the name of Mother Earth am I even wearing? My fiancè’s underwear, his stained t-shirt from yesterday, and — wait for this one— mismatched flip-flops. There. You’ve got the whole picture.

I am in the process of cleaning up my sister’s flat in preparation for my elderly grandad’s arrival — the uninhabited, unrenovated flat has hardly ever received a proper clean since we bought the property three years ago. Generally used as storage space by our three families, in the past year it has housed most of our belongings since our side of the property shrunk into a one-bed flat during our turn for the remodeling works.

These two rooms have been our sole living space for most of my youngest daughter’s life, now fifteen months old — a multi-purpose kitchen doubling as shared office space, laundry room and playroom, and a bedroom where most of our furniture also lives. With our girls growing up and our adult lives evolving alongside them, the place has been feeling less and less welcoming and more and more engulfing with every passing month. What used to be generously sized, charmingly low-ceilinged, a little-dark-but-how-delightfully-characterful rooms, now feel as cavrnous prisons. I am starting to feel claustrophobic. And fed up.

And while I know that even having these two rooms, functioning plumbing, central heating, lighting (albeit bin-lined) and a roof over our head is a considerable privilege, I can’t help craving light.
And space.
And privacy.
And beauty.
I long to feel settled.
I long to see around me a place that looks and feels like us.
I long for a sense of home.

And honestly? I have had enough of pushing drying racks out of the way every time I wish to reach the fridge or the dishwasher.

So here I am, frazzled and frankly quite irritated for having been left to face this mastodontic task alone by my mother — sure a high percentage of the clutter belongs to us and our children, but not all of it, and at least the cleaning tasks could have been shared once I was through with the decluttering (or more accurately the clutter-stacking)? — all while my own house also resembles a junk yard.

I have just made my way back into our kitchen through the obstacle course and Jenga-work of furniture and stacked boxes needed to keep my crafty crawler from walking out the front door while I spin around with rubber gloves and wash-cloths. I am still muttering under my breath when my daughter swirls in with her messy caramel waves bouncing around her and sparkles in her eyes.

“Come, Mama, come see! There is a color in the bathroom!”

I have just been to the bathroom in grandad’s flat — I have just dusted, and scraped, and wiped all around it. There were no colors when I left. I am sure of it.

I can already feel the rage surging from the pit of my stomach. In my mind, I am already running over all possible color-related scenarios that may occur when a three-year-old is left unsupervised in a freshly cleaned bathroom. I am not in the mood for impromptu floor or wall art, not today.

She seems to glide past the chaos as I plod along after her, stumbling through cardboard boxes, scattered shoes, and the entire contents of the left-side kitchen cupboard which her baby sister has just meticulously emptied right in front of the doorway. She looks uncommonly pleased with herself. What is it with babies and pots?

“Under the table, under the table!”

When I reach the bathroom, she is pointing at the tiles underneath my mother’s old console table, tucked against the wall. “Ah, this needs to be moved or grandad will trip over it at night when he forgets it’s there” — is my first, functional thought.

And then I see it. A rainbow. A soft-edged, leaf-shaped fragment of rainbow. It shivers, impalpable, across the pink surface of the tiles. And then it dances on the palm of her open hand as she giggle gleefully. My daughter looks back at me. She’s beaming. Quiet tears well up in my eyes.

“Thank you for showing me this. Thank you for sharing it with me, Babi.”

She nestles into my lap and, for a while, we stare in silence at the rainbow petal on the wall. In the bathroom, under the table — just like she said.

“How does it happen?”

“It’s the sunshine, it filters in from that window over there, then it bounces on that big mirror and then it lands on the wall.” — now it’s probably not the time to get into the depths of prismatic light refraction.

She traces the path of the light from the window, to the mirror and then onto the wall with her eyes. For now she seems satisfied with the answer.

I lean my chin softly on her head and give her little birdy body a gentle squeeze.

“What does it mean?”

I know she’s not asking for further clarification about the physics of rainbows. Not in this case. Too often I have walked around with her and told her — “Oh, it’s a sign from the Universe!”, every time she spotted a squirrel, a swift, a wild rose, an acorn, or a cloud. I think it’s my way to help her create a meaningful connection with nature in a world where children seem to be growing further apart from the environment with every generation.

Especially Italian children — my girls here are often looked at with concern and disbelief when they play outdoors — free, often barefoot, and serene with grass stains on their knees, leaves in their hair, and occasionally gravel in their underwear.
Here children are not often allowed to play with dirt.
Here children grow afraid of getting dirty.
Here brown and green stains on a blouse are avoided at all costs, more often than not.
“Don’t sit on the grass, you’ll get dirty"!”
“Don’t touch the leaves, they’re dirty!”
“Don’t dig in there, the mud’s all dirty!”

One day she came back from one of her daycare mornings claiming she didn’t want to play in the garden because “La terra è sporca, mamma” — “Soil is dirty, mama”. I felt my heart freeze and crack at those words. Calling plants by their name, teaching her how to distinguish nettle from melissa, appreciating the intimidating beauty of a carpenter bee, and inviting her to believe that, whenever something natural draws her attention, that may be a message for her from the Earth is part of my legacy to her.

So when she asks “What does it mean?”, the words flow out of me without hesitation — “It’s a blessing, darling. It means you are loved”.

“And you are loved.” — she looks up and smiles.

And in this moment I feel blessed too.

She’ll probably keep pointing at the flashy, glittery, pink toys at the supermarket every time she catches a glimpse of them.
My heart will sink every time she’ll say that she prefers the swimming pool to the seashore.
She may still routinely come back claiming that soil is dirty, vegetables are bleah, blue is for boys and pink is for girls.

My work is not done yet. But today none of this matters right now.

Today she found a sign.
Today she chose to share its sacred message with with me.
Today she believes in magic.
Today she belongs with nature.
Today she is loved.
By me.
By Mother Earth.
She can feel it.
She knows.
She has evidence of it.
In my arms around her.
And in this speck of rainbow on the bathroom tiles.