We are standing in front of our apartment on a hot and humid morning, and it is the first time in over a week I have been well enough to take him to daycare. We welcome this return, although we do not speak it. It lives in our eyes, in the way we look at one another. Everything once again in the right place. A bird chirps brightly from above and I ask Jones what it said.
“First he said hello to me then he said hello to you.”
We wave back, and as we walk up the street Jones tells me his dream from the night.
“I was a baby and I lived in Mommy’s hair.”
It is a beautiful image, and I feel like a light has just entered into my body. Jones happy and striking poses on the sidewalk, and then a crack of thunder above and around us, big drops of rain falling slow then fast. We hurry for shelter, finding some on the porch of a large, old house. The house with the raspberry bush. The house where the owners used to invite us in and give us things from their garden, before they moved away and the property became so mysteriously and beautifully overgrown.
Sheltered, we feel like we’re in a turret or a cave. All is brick and stone and dark cement. The rain is harder now and it’s exciting, cathartic. Everybody on the street soaking wet, everybody feeling vulnerable, yet freer than they’ve felt in a long time–all relieved to have the order and artifice of their day washed from them. And Jones begins to sing and dance. A scene from Singing in the Rain. His smile is big and silly and true, and the rain pours off the sloped roof above us like a waterfall– the fortune, the miracle to be alive within this baptismal moment.
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Notice what you feel:
I am walking back from daycare and I have my eyes closed. It is the morning, still fresh, and I am noticing the fine, barely perceptible sparks of rain that fall on my face. It feels like something mysterious and alive, something benevolent. I am noticing my breathing, how I labour with it and have to consciously inhale through the prongs in my nose. I feel the oxygen tank on my back, how it pulls against my body, my muscles tightening, growing tense. I open my eyes, now concerned that I may be veering blindly toward someone on the sidewalk, and I see my street, a ribbon separating the red, brick homes on either side, and the impossible leaves all around them, jewels spilling from a treasure chest, wet and almost shining.
Notice movement:
I am in motion. All of me, everything contained within and without, and all the world around swirling like mists. Everything in constant motion, even the rocks, everything in the process of degrading and reforming, everything sightlessly churning. I push Jones down the street in his stroller and an airplane passes loudly overhead, contrails streaming behind. Jones yells and points, his pupils expanding in the wonder of recognition. A cat slinks out of a bush and looks at us, considers things, and then begins a cautious journey across the street, each step the brushstroke of a great artist. We pass by a woman walking two dogs who pause to rummage through the rubble of some broken jack-o-lanterns on a lawn. They look up at us like the shadows we are, and then we arrive at daycare and a bird, unseen, chirps smally from a tree before emerging and rising beyond us in flight.
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Under the awning girls in tube tops giggle while their boyfriends watch them, imagining lifting their twisting and smiling and screaming bodies up, and carrying them out into the cooling streams of rain– the moment and everybody in it, becoming slick, beautiful and imperishable.
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