Alfalfa shook her head as if she could shake out the demons with the raindrops in her hair. She’d been angry three times today already, and it wasn’t even afternoon. They were all stupid reasons, she thought, and now I can’t stop being grumpy. She was angry with herself. She thought she rooted out the worst of her self-hatred, decades of peeling that particular onion, layer after layer, until–she’d thought–there were only small pockets of it wedged in hidden places, sparked on rare occasions. Until now those remaining pockets felt like tiny eruptions, small squalls only, not the deadly storms that used to make her want to die. In recent days, though, these crazy short-fused bursts of anger were chased by strange backlashes of self-loathing, akin to what she weathered long ago and thought she’d left behind. Left behind like the cottage on the lake she and her father used to visit in the summers, her nose pressed up against the car window each time they had to leave, the cottage growing smaller and smaller as they drove away. She shook her head again, a softer gesture now, sadness deep inside her. She missed her father. Not his compulsive need for order, never that, but the kind of dance he did with life, the part of him that loved every inch of that lake and showed her why. He gave her her name one summer there all those years ago, and she let it stick, goofy as it was. She let people think it was some crazy hippie choice, some commune-loving naiveté. She didn’t say it was the magic whimsy of the man who showed her faces in weathered bits of wood, who made her fall in love with wet stones at the edge of the lake, the man who always let her feel like a person, who never treated her like a child.

[Editor’s note: timed writing, the prompt to include the words grumpy, dance, compulsive and raindrops.]