Day 122,

Melaina stopped by today as the children were cleaning up to leave.  They were all curious as she started taking measurements, knocking on various parts of the wall, and discussing with me where to put “it.”  I took the opportunity to hype things up a little bit and saying that Melaina was here to help me prepare a surprise for all of them.

It’ll be amusing watching them try to guess over the coming days.  One of them actually already suggested it might be “a giant tablet” but that got shot down by the others as being silly.  “Where would anyone even get that much wax?”

On an unrelated note, I’m thinking of inviting Lin and Cass out to my place for dinner sometime soon.  Maybe Vernon too.  Partly to be sociable, partly as a thanks for the various things they’ve done for me, and partly to give Maiko the opportunity to see them.  Maybe it’s not my place to do that for her, but the more time I spend with her the more I get the impression that her lack of social contact isn’t entirely by choice or even her preference.  And maybe it’s a little condescending (I don’t want to think of it that way, but I can see how others might interpret it as such) but I can’t help feeling sort of responsible for her seeing as how I accidentally ended up being the catalyst for her interacting with people.  Of course, I’ll talk to her about this first before I bring it up with the rest of them.

Now that I’m thinking about it, she’s been running around on her own for years.  I can’t be the only one who’s ever caught a glimpse of her in the trees or out on her boat.  Then again, I’ve been afraid to ask about any sort of rumors like that for fear of drawing more attention to her than she’s ready for.  On the one hand, if some people at least have an inkling that she exists, it might make things a little easier if she ever decides to fully come out of hiding.  On the other hand, the last thing I want to do is get rumors going that there’s a giant red-skinned spirit woman running around near the Village and put people on alert looking out for her when she’d rather not be seen.

Maybe I ought to start reading through the archives of the past decade or two.  It’s a long shot, but sightings of her or her mother might have been unusual enough for someone to get excited and report it to the old archivist.  And knowing Maiko, it would have been a pretty brief entry that would have been easy to miss when I was skimming through everything for reorganizing.