Slim, narrow days. It seems we never had so many cans of tomatoes before. I don’t think we’re really hoarding, we just don’t know how many we need so we buy extra. The pollen coated everything in a lime-green dust. My eyes burned from it, but I didn’t care. We let the windows open like the Germans do to air our bedrooms out in the morning. Four months ago I got rear-ended and have been driving a rental car ever since. Just today the body shop called to say it’s ready. I even romanticized those scenes I worked at Microsoft over the years, waiting for my client to let me in, then leaving mid-afternoon, walking to the parking garage. My life! The loop: the fatigue in all of this….the rental car with the plastic gloves and the face mask and the hiking boots in the trunk, trying to take a hike on Sunday morning but it’s a country drive instead because the trail is closed. Walking to the lake with Lily and how she seems to get older every step, as if it’s happening on this very walk, these new features in her face…and how time bends like that, how you never really know. Watching the bats with her at dusk as they feed off the surface of the lake, swooping in and out…how the tall trees lean in, how they take all of that weight and wind and just keep standing through it all. How much we’re like those trees: what keeps us standing and reaching up lies unseen, so far beneath the surface.
Share this:
Categories: inspiration, parenting, prose, writing
Bill Pearse 