Sixth Month With You

You can't get comfortable. We suspect teeth are making their way through, an oddly wishful sort of thinking. You find refugee in your father's arms. You seek his voice, stay momentarily peaceful against his chest.

At first I enjoy the reprieve, the lightness of limbs only responsible for their own weight, but quickly, so quickly, I begin to worry. You will come back to me, won't you? You will be all mine again once more?

Your father offers you bits of food: spinach, sweet potatoes, forbidden yogurt. He is already representing a larger world, one beyond my arms, beyond my breast. This is where six months will bring you. Half way around the sun, your own arms stripped tan. Old ladies ask to hold you, at libraries, in the church lobby. They tire in moments from the weight of your perfect density. I feel that I still do not know you, that you are full of secrets. I want your mysteries to be revealed. I want nothing to change. Meanwhile, you make time race. Meanwhile, you make the days stretch on and on and on. 

 Arlo at around the same age. 

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Jenkintown By Way of Philadelphia

A quick trip to see a friend I've been missing. To explore the best science museum that ever was or will ever be. To stay up too late whispering among sleeping children. To eat street side pizza. To grill food until the propane runs out.

A hundred and fifty miles and heavy handfuls of hours are enough to give you a taste of an unknown place and serve as a reminder to let less time pass before you see people you love.

While there is always more to do, certainly more to say, we had time for castles and diners, two visits to the playground and a trip to an old timey soda fountain. A felicitous first field trip for the new school year.

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Living Among Ghosts

What it must be like to pass by the bones of your ancestors, day in and day out, on the way to the grocery store, late at night after an evening drinking. Buried on the family plot next to the cottage that has weathered storms and sadness, built by the hands of your grandfather. There is no denying your mortality. Your last name will live on in this place, but you will return to the earth just like those who came before you.

The people there hold on to their accents, a brogue as knobby as the live oak trees that shade the graves of their forefathers. Everything that has withstood is weathered. The beauty is is not bright. It is the hidden sort, found on lichen covered fences. Discovered on deeply lined faces not so quick to smile.

As a child, we would visit. Take the ferry for a day. My mom would drag us down small streets to peer at the headstones and build stories around skeletal facts. A name. A birth date. The year of death. Mothers who lost child after child. Families gone the span of twelve months.

We were children. We did not want to think of death. The roads were hot and the mosquitos plentiful. We wanted to walk on to the lone toy shop. We wanted someone to buy us an ice cream. When the chorus of complaining children reached its crescendo, my mom would finally walk on, but she always looked back. She knew things I did not yet know. She felt things I wouldn't feel for years.

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Sea People

I am suspicious of people who say that they aren't beach people, in much the same way that animal people are suspicious of me when it comes to my hesitation with dogs and other pets.

Not liking the beach seems akin to not liking fun, not liking objectively good things. It is a sentiment I cannot fathom. The water has always held me captive, the one place I always want to be, regardless of season, but most painfully during the summer. It offers equal measures of entertainment and relaxation. It's the place I feel most at peace.

As a child, I felt sorry for all non-marine animals, the animals who lived their entire lives sweltering on the savannas or in the jungles without the ability to submerge themselves.  The best animals were, without a doubt, marine mammals because living on land gave them the perspective to truly appreciate being in the water, a perspective not enjoyed by fish, who didn't know how lucky they were.

I'm certain I inherited this sense from my mother, who shutters when uttering the phrase "landlocked." She rushed us to the ocean every chance she got and had us swimming in the bay  during all the times in between. She too seems to feel that life was designed to be lived in the place where the elements meet. It's something primordial, felt as deeply within me as the knowledge of God. And so we find our way back there as often as we can, to dig holes and ride waves and chase flocks of seagulls. We wander the island in search of cold beer and ice cream.  The kids explore by bike. Chickens roam through the yard. Figs get collected and turned to cake. The landscape, bleached and salty, home to twisted trees, whispers stories of pirates and sunken submarines. We keep coming back. To listen. To feel. To submerge.

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