The most distinctive mark I make thus far. Setting down the last leg, or perhaps the fourth tire of the small white car she drives around the circle of days, or back and forth in the nahuatl crescent. Yellow, the sun's fire, its gold excrement. Well, not to make light (so to speak) of a core belief, but I always said that wearing yellow makes my face look like it's made of baby shit. Not that baby shit is such a bad thing. I've worn it for real often enough. Wiping those little bottoms, reading Meg McCracken and Thelma Bombeck (who are those women?) all in earnest, a real and utter belief, unquestioned until years later. You have to believe when you're willing to spend many hours of each week just cleaning the diapers. Washing each one in the toilet to remove most of the creamy feces, then soaking them in a plastic, lidded trash bucket of sludgy water and antiseptic for a couple days before carrying about fifty pounds of the water and diapers downstairs to the laundry. Then wringing out each one, emptying and refilling the container, to say nothing of the actual washing, drying, folding. What did the nahuatl do? Did they have some kind of little nappy (a loincloth isn't quite the thing, is it?) or did they let those precious stones, those feathers, those little flakes go wherever they liked and just clean up after them? Nowadays, however, I remember those old belief systems with the smile of distance that recognizes a mountain when she sees it.