Sloane Turns Six In Boughs Of Local Tree

A brief note before I begin: Monday is the third anniversary of the Daily Kina, and I’d like to invite you all to send over little mastheads, portraits, or headlines of your own in celebration of this auspicious occasion, which I will be pleased to share here. Thanks to all of you who find this newspaper a fulfilling daily ritual. We think of you often. Okay, let’s go:

There are seven and a half months every calendar year in which Kina and her oldest, dearest friend are the same age. That period has at last begun again, now that both of them are six.

Kina has known this friend for so long that she spent the entire first year of their friendship mispronouncing her name. For months, Kina would putter around the house squeaking, “Loodle-own! Loodle-own!” for reasons that eluded us. Hannah, her nanny, had no idea what she was talking about, and we had no idea what she was talking about. All we knew was that Kina had learned a new and puzzling word.

It wasn’t until she was thirteen months or so old that we figured it out; Hannah was telling us one evening about how she and Kina had been spending a lot of time at her little friend’s house, which prompted Kina to erupt into a chorus of “Loodle-own! Loodle-own!” An expression of friendship! A name! It wasn’t long after that she began to call her by her actual name: Sloane.

Kina and Sloane have spent a lot of time together in the last (first) six years of their lives. For the first couple of years, before either was really in school, they’d meet up frequently at the house or the playground and while the days away together. I worried a bit, as they enrolled in separate schools, that they would grow apart, but my concerns were clearly misplaced, and they made it work just fine. They’ve had some notable stretches of time spent apart, of course—the pandemic was a real drag on their daily ritual, and vacations have taken the occasional toll on their near-constant companionship—but each absence seems only to cement their friendship further, as they reunite and grow into each others’ arms.

Sloane—a figure of legendary reticence whose lack of comment to this newsroom has made our coverage of her political positions somewhat spotty1—once barely spoke, except to Kina, who served effectively as her outer voice and daily confidante. Kina would return from a day out with stories about Sloane’s preferences and misgivings, but I could never discern how exactly she’d come to understand them. Sloane didn’t speak to me for the first three years of her life, but she reveled in Kina the entire time.

One day, mid-pandemic, upon returning from summer vacation, Sloane started speaking—and with gusto. The girls took up dance classes in Sloane’s living room, donning tutus to learn “Waltz of the Flowers” from the Nutcracker. For months, they practiced the steps; Kina would return home to demonstrate rond de jambe and talk about how she and Sloane hopped from one corner of the living room to the other.

On the day of their recital, performed in the same living room in which they’d both learned to dance, they twirled and leapt in concert, but it was clear which one of them preferred basketball—Sloane, who escaped in the seconds after the performance to take a few shots in the backyard.

Even now, the two friends have profoundly different tastes in just about everything but each other. Sloane is sporty, Kina a princess. Kina eats more or less whatever, Sloane is more selective. Kina watches a ruckus, Sloane dives headlong into it. Most notably: Sloane, once silent and skeptical, now out-chats Kina like a champ.

Where they are the same: Their devotion to each other, their love of makeup, their inexhaustible energy, and—for the next seven and a half months—their age.2 I think they’re lucky to be friends, these two little girls, and hope they stay fastened together as long as they find solace in one another. I’ve never had a friend like Sloane, and I’m terribly protective of Kina’s fortune that they’ve found each other, flying about together in a giddy ellipse—sometimes five, sometimes six, sometimes two, sometimes one.

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