Sunday, the first day +60 degrees in a long time. In the morning under the trees it sounds like the birds are filling into the auditorium, taking their seats. They all know when to come back and they all know when it’s time to go. I make a wish on my walk to the lake and return: today I’ll get the grill out, hang the hammock, open the windows in the bedroom. And on the lawn chair at the corner of our yard, all those spring memories come back, the shuffling of the cards.

Got the bikes out for the kids, took my shirt off, felt the soft burn of it in the light. All those small peeping, tweeting sounds in the trees, my kind of notification. And the first flies set upon my bare feet, I could be Walt Whitman with my beer, on a suburban Sunday. They were just common flies, but I let them check me out. All the hair on my legs stopped growing, fell out, displaced to other parts of my body in random swirls: but the legs now baby smooth, translucent-white. And the flies reminded me of the fish I let nibble my skin in one of those southeast Asian tanks you put your feet in; it’s supposed to be relaxing or restorative but it was neither when I did it in Prague and one of them drew blood, and they had to clean the tank out.

And I didn’t play jazz or classical music but listened to the birds instead, couldn’t identify a single one of them but each played their own tune and together, it all worked.

At the Whole Foods I got in line behind a girl with Pippi Longstocking hair, two bags of jalapeño chips, a San Pellegrino: and the Madonna song “Crazy for You” came on, put us in a spell, and rather than stand there facing forward she spun around and seemed to move on cue to some inner dialogue, and smiled/looked back at me as she left, and I wondered, was she touched? Like, in the Irish sense? And aren’t we all come spring, the opposite manic from fall, from winter? The light’s its own intoxicant.

Photo by Loren Chasse, Waitts Lake, eastern Washington (March, 2015)

This post a near opposite of one here.

Categories: Memoir, musings

Tags: creative nonfiction, humor, pacific northwest, parenting, Seattle, William Pearse writer