Jones and I are both in good moods.
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.